By the Computerworld Philippines Staff
March 1, 2008

For its first CIO roundtable discussion this year, Computerworld Philippines decided to focus on interoperability, an issue that may seldom be discussed these days but creates just as big an impact on an organization. And for participants at the roundtable, interoperability— which, for the purpose of the discussion is defined as the ability to collaborate and integrate diverse applications and systems and make them work seamlessly together—is inevitable.

The guests for the year’s first CIO Roundtable discussion were: Michael Dennis Asiddao, head of the information technology & operations group, Megalink Inc.; Rodelio Cayetano, first vice president and IT head, Asia United Bank; and Lito Estacio, chief information officer, Cypress Semiconductors Phils.

Also present was Albert dela Cruz, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Philippines, who offered some interesting insights on interoperability and open source and talked about Microsoft’s initiatives as it gradually opens its arms to support open standards in today’s IT ecosystem.

Although he believes interoperability is no longer as big an issue as before, Estacio says it is still as big and as vital as asking when we can achieve ‘world peace.’ Meanwhile, Asiddao, having just joined Megalink late last year, shares his experiences and challenges in integrating disparate applications on different platforms among the different member banks of the Megalink consortium. As banks are usually one of the biggest spenders on technology and are therefore just as much plagued by interoperability concerns, Asia United Bank’s Cayetano openly offers his two cents’ worth on interoperability and how his company addresses the various issues relating to this.

Excerpts of the discussion follow:

CWP: How big an issue is interoperability today? Is this a challenge that confronts one industry or company more than another or has it already become a universal issue?

Estacio: It’s not as big as yesterday but it’s still as big as “when can we have world peace?” It’s a challenge for every industry I’ve worked with—manufacturing, academe, power, research and development, sales, marketing. Everyone needs information and information requires handshakes between or among sources; interoperability is the handshake.

Asiddao: Interoperability has always been a challenge. In the case of Megalink, we practically live and die connecting clients with us and the challenge to interoperate is there because they have their own systems running, their own CASA banking system, etc. It is a challenge to link with them and to operate seamlessly because to interoperate when you have different applications that run on different platforms always has cost implications; so it is a very relevant challenge at this moment. In a bank, when you are building your data warehouse, it would be easier if the interoperability issue has been addressed so you can launch products or solutions much quickly. Now, is it a universal issue or does it affect one industry more than another? In the case of Megalink, when we talk to clients or a bank that would launch a product, one of the questions they would ask is whether we can seamlessly interoperate with each other. If the system is closed, the more work will have to be done; you have to find ways and means to interoperate and, surprisingly, there are systems out there that are very closed and it will really take time, especially for systems whose applications are hard coded. Also, if there are existing solutions or applications which are being used like that and you want to integrate and interoperate, that will be a challenge.

CWP: How many banks are currently members of the Megalink consortium?

Asiddao: I believe we have around 20 but there are new members coming on board so the challenge is really to make these applications talk with each other and be able to address all the data and financial requirements to make everything seamless. So interoperability is a challenge that has always been there in the IT side and if you have that, then this follows for the business segment because you have to address this first in order for the company to be able to address the business requirements.

Cayetano: I’d like to start by defining what interoperability means. It means working together, the inter-collaboration of systems which exchange information and this means that this affects not only a single company and I could say it will be a universal requirement. In some countries like the US and UK they are into interoperability; I think they developed a framework on interoperability basically to define what the needs are and how to go there.

Dela Cruz: I think this issue is universal. As far as I can remember, the only time that there wasn’t any problem with interoperability was if you were a Big Blue shop years ago; because if your hardware, your software, and even your service are all coming from IBM, interoperability wouldn’t really be a problem. Today, you won’t see any shop anywhere that is homogenous in systems or hardware. There are so many problems and, of course, different problems have different solutions and there is really no one company that can answer all of those problems so interoperability comes into play—and by this we mean not just connecting but for these applications to be actually usable.

CWP: Is it really inevitable for companies to have a mix of open source and proprietary systems today? Or do you believe a company can survive and compete well enough by sticking to just one system all throughout? Is there really a one-size-fits-all system out there?

Estacio: Yes, it is inevitable—all in the name of cost, speed of delivery, implementation, return on investment, etc. A company without a heterogeneous platform will not stay long. Imagine a country that does not trade with other countries, does not recognize diplomatic rights or engagement and has no cross-cultural learning, etc.- that country is bound for invasion or chaos. There’s no such thing as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ system. It’s a myth.

Dela Cruz: Interoperability is one thing but open standards is another, because in order to communicate of course you have to be using the same standard unlike before, again using the example I gave earlier, IBM has their own standard which everybody has to follow because they held the majority of the market, but now the thrust for any other vendor is to open their standards for interoperability and I think that’s inevitable. I’m sure all organizations, companies, and manufacturers would have to abide by open standards. Of course, there are two sides of that—there are standards that are imposed upon—the de jure and there are the de facto standards, because the public chooses to use this standard even if there’s a published, recommended standard. A classic example would be the Internet—there’s the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model which is a published data standard but what’s being used in the Internet is TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol) which basically was a standard developed by the community. So again, there could be many standards but, at the end of the day, it’s the market and the users that actually dictate which one will be prevalent.

CWP: And you are saying that the vendors will have no choice but to abide?

Dela Cruz: Of course, it’s always in the users’ hands and vendors have no choice because if that’s where the market is going it makes good business sense to develop in that direction.

Cayetano: The old banks who were into legacy systems are having problems right now on interoperability; but interoperability can be implemented on open source and even on proprietary systems, but it is far less expensive and easier to do it on open source.

CWP: Is this what you are preaching at Microsoft? Are people actually listening to you?

Dela Cruz: Some are, actually, the more objective ones but it depends on who you talk to. Some people treat open source as a religion so with them you will never win, they won’t believe when we say we are opening up. Microsoft has been working with a lot of open source companies like MySQL which is our number one competitor for database; we have done technical work, technical level integration that makes MySQL run 30% better than the previous application on a Microsoft platform. You won’t believe it but if you take a survey, most of the people that are using open source applications like PHP, Apache, MySQL are actually running it on a Microsoft platform even more than Linux, surprisingly. So, at Microsoft, we recognize that open source is here to stay, we will compete with the products—that’s definitely inevitable; but it makes perfect sense to make those open source applications operate at par or even better in our platform. At the end of the day, you don’t install Windows or Linux for the OS (operating system) but because of the applications.

CWP: But is there really such a thing as a one-size fits all system out there?

Cayetano: Probably there is except that would be too expensive since you would be locked in on that platform; like what happened to the older banks who went into legacy systems, they are having problems right now. Today, the thrust of the bank is to have a single point of contact because you have different types of customers who avail of different types of product—what we want to do is give you access to our system where you can do all your banking transactions at your convenience anytime, anywhere. We have new delivery channels—the existing one is physical, meaning you have to go to the bank, we have the ATM, now comes the Internet, mobile, and phone banking. Now if you do not have a system that can make this work together, it will be difficult to provide these services.

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