Founding Members of Interop Vendor Alliance, Including Sun Microsystems, Novell, BEA Systems and SOFTWARE AG, Share Common Goal of Making Technologies Work Better Together for Customers: Today at Microsoft TechEd: IT Forum 2006, Microsoft announced the formation of the Interop Vendor Alliance, a global, cross-industry group of software and hardware vendors that will work together to identify opportunities for enhancing interoperability with Microsoft systems on behalf of their customers. Customers are telling Microsoft that interoperability is as important to them as security and reliability. Because of this, Microsoft is seeking to proactively work with partners and competitors alike to help increase customers' return on investment in their IT solutions while reducing the cost and risk associated with integrating diverse systems. Founding members of the alliance include Advanced Micro Devices Inc., (AMD), BEA Systems Inc., Business Objects, CA, The Carbon Project, Centeris Corp., Citrix Systems Inc., GXS Inc., IP Commerce Inc., JNBridge LLC, Kernel Networks, Levi, Ray & Shoup Inc., Microsoft, NEC Corp. of America, Network Appliance Inc., Novell Inc., Q4bis, Quest Software Inc., Siemens Enterprise Communications, SOFTWARE AG, SugarCRM Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Symphony Services Corp., Xcalia, and XenSource Inc. Microsoft welcomes other organizations and vendors across the industry to explore membership in the alliance. "Every day, enterprises across the globe face the challenges of streamlining their business processes, getting closer to customers and partners, and making mergers and acquisitions successful. These challenges typically involve making a wide variety of software from many different vendors work together," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. "By bringing together organizations and vendors representing a broad set of interoperability capabilities, the Interop Vendor Alliance will help identify opportunities for the creation and delivery of real-world solutions that will improve the flow of information across the enterprise." The goal of the new alliance is to foster interoperability across IT systems through communication and identification of opportunities for enhanced collaboration. More specifically, the alliance will focus on these goals: -- Encourage vendor collaboration to foster interoperability. The alliance provides a venue for members to socialize customer feedback with an eye toward increasing technical collaboration that targets common interoperability challenges. Vendors will have opportunities to share relevant technical information with other members to improve the interoperability of their products with Microsoft systems. Collaborative activities will also include technical meetings and the sharing of customer scenarios. -- Enable scenario-based testing for interoperability. The alliance members will have opportunities to work with customers to identify their top interoperability challenges. Microsoft expects these scenarios to include systems management, virtualization, identity management, data integration, storage management, portal integration and interoperability of developer tools. Microsoft plans to host testing sessions on a per-scenario basis to validate real-life conditions for customers. -- Communicate vendor interoperability solutions to customers. Alliance members will have the ability to post best-practice guides created as a result of scenario-based testing to an Alliance Web site. Vendors will also have opportunities to post descriptions, white papers and case studies about their solutions that provide interoperability with Microsoft on the Interop Vendor Alliance Web site. In addition to fostering deeper collaboration among the vendors, the alliance will bring together technology leaders to consider innovative ways to address customer interoperability challenges. "In response to customer requests, we have worked with Microsoft in recent years to make our products more interoperable," said Rich Green, executive vice president of software at Sun Microsystems. "Expanding this work as part of the new Interop Vendor Alliance will help us respond to our mutual customers' needs and make it as simple as possible for their employees, customers and partners to access and act on data, regardless of the underlying IT system." "Over the past 10 years there has been exponential growth in connectivity throughout all information technology solutions, making interoperability and reuse of existing business logic increasingly important," said Dr. Peter Kuerpick, member of the board at SOFTWARE AG. "The Interop Vendor Alliance provides our customers with transparency across the different platforms by sharing information aggregated in our CentraSite offering about various software assets to the Microsoft platform." "Customers count on Novell products and solutions to fit easily into their heterogeneous IT environments," said Susan Heystee, vice president of Global Strategic Alliances at Novell. "Participation as a founding member in the Interop Vendor Alliance underscores the recent commitments between Novell and Microsoft and works to further extend and enhance our customers' investments." For Microsoft, the Interop Vendor Alliance is yet another facet of its emphasis on delivering interoperability by design. Working with the broader community of customers and vendors is one of many ways to achieve this goal. Microsoft has increased its efforts to deliver interoperability by design with commitments to open specifications that include Web services, open document formats, virtualization, anti-spam technologies and technical collaborations with open source providers such as Novell, Zend Technologies Ltd. and XenSource, as well as significant interoperability testing for applications and hardware for Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office system releases. More information about Microsoft's interoperability efforts can be found at its Web site . More information about the Interop Vendor Alliance can be found at its Web site .