San Francisco 2016: Proceedings - Open Platform 3.0 Forum

Open Platform 3.0™ Forum:
Provision of a Practical Open Platform 3.0 Environment

Objective of Meeting

The Open Platform 3.0™ Forum has so far focused on the development of specifications for a standard interoperable digital platform, and for aspects of supporting digital technologies. An effort to make available a practical platform instance would be a valuable addition to this. It would give direction to the specification efforts, and ensure that they are based on a real understanding of the issues and practical considerations involved. The resulting platform would be a valuable resource that would enable companies to experiment with digital platform concepts in a vendor-neutral environment. The purpose of this session was to discuss the possibility and to establish the potential interest of Forum members in contributing to the activity.

Summary

We are moving into a world where implementation is more valuable than documentation for the development of new products and solutions. Standards should therefore be accompanied by reference implementations that developers can use and learn from. The meeting discussed the possibility of creating a reference implementation for the Open Platform 3.0 standard. Doing this would have the further benefit of informing the definition of the standard.

The specific possibility considered was that OpenStack could be a basis for a practical Open Platform 3.0 environment. OpenStack could be a component of a conforming platform, and could support reference implementations of other components; for example, it could support a reference implementation of the Open Business Data Lake (O-BDL), or reference implementations of standards concerned with the Internet of Things (IoT). This would be very valuable.

Outputs

The detailed minutes of the meeting are available to members of the Open Platform 3.0 Forum.

Next Steps

If the Open Group Board decides in principle that an initiative to provide a practical Open Platform 3.0 environment is desirable, the Open Platform 3.0 Forum will propose the specific form that the initiative should take.