Standards keynote: The role and influence of standards Chris Ferris,IBM Distinguished Engineer, CTO Industry Software Standards, IBM Software Group
Objective to discuss standards in general, as informational to EP society as it considers standards. As for EPTS’ role in standards:
“Work with existing standards development organizations such as OMG, OASIS and W3C to disseminate and where necessary incubate a set of consistent; standards in the areas of: event formats, event processing interoperability, event processing (meta) modeling and (meta) languages; EPTS does not plan to develop standards itself.”
Back to Chris’ talk:
Open Standards
- improve information sharing
- simplify integration of disparate technology
- promote interoperability
What is a meaningful gauge?
- Broad adoption
- public interfaces/public input
- path to long term stewardship
What to watch out for
- “based on standards”
- “leverages open standards”
- “standardized on a particular product”
Why are standards important? For technology adopters, standards create choice, flexibility, speed, agility and skills. “Open standards give us the most options and the best chance to gain real interoperability”. “Taking care of your customers first will take care of your business!” (obligatory dig on vendors with “closed standards”)
Chris then shared IBM’s approach to standards development, from idea generation to innovation to standardization to ecosystem exploitation. He provided industry standards development tips to EPTS members, which were helpful to the group, but not relevant to the majority of my blog readers.
IBM notes the following standards as relevant to EP:
- WS-Eventing*
- WS-Notification*
- StreamSQL
*the joint IBM-Microsoft work to bring WS-Eventing & WS-Notification together as WS-EventNotification (pdf) has stopped. New WS-Eventing work has been proposed to W3C.
