EMC, IBM and Microsoft jointly create first web services interface specification

The companies intend to submit the CMIS specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for advancement through its open standards process.

"For some time now the world of content management has been evolving from separate application platforms to an integral part of a company's information infrastructure,"

said Mohammed Amin, Regional Manager, EMC Middle East & North West Africa.

"As content management rapidly becomes a key piece of a company's business process, there's a heightened need for interoperability between the vast and diverse sources that manage this content. Today's agreement is a major step forward in achieving this goal," he added.

The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments. Currently, customers must spend valuable time and money to create and maintain custom integration code and one-off integrations to get different ECM systems within their organizations to "talk" to one another. The specification will also benefit independent software vendors (ISVs) by enabling them to create their own specialized applications capable of running over a variety of content management systems.

Working together since late 2006, the three companies were joined in the creation of the CMIS draft specification by other leading software providers including: Alfresco Software, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. A final gathering of all seven companies was held recently in Redmond, Washington to validate true interoperability of the specification before submission to OASIS.

"Many companies today are struggling with how to unlock the full value of their data when they have multiple content management solutions dispersed throughout their organization. Currently, 'marrying' these into one integrated system -- or migrating content between systems -- costs the IT department a lot in time and money,"

said Melissa Webster, Program Vice President, Content & Digital Media Technologies at IDC.

"Given the need for a common standard that will enable customers to access disparate repositories, today's announcement certainly seems like a very positive step in the right direction," he added.

"By working together to achieve a common standard, IBM, Microsoft and EMC are clearly putting the needs of all customers first. And we have worked hard to develop a standard that continues IBM's efforts to leverage the principles of SOA and Web 2.0 interfaces to benefit the industry as a whole,"

said Ken Bisconti, Vice President, Products and Strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management.

Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Microsoft Office Business Platform, said:

"The real winner in today's announcement is the customer. Today's businesses are driven by information, and when companies operate in silos, with information scattered throughout the enterprise, it becomes extremely difficult to leverage and realize its full value. By working together, we believe we can enable customers to maximize the use of critical business assets."

Key to the new specification, EMC, IBM and Microsoft worked together to develop an interface that:

• Is designed to work over existing repositories enabling customers to build and leverage applications against multiple repositories -- unlocking content they already have.
• De-couples web services and content from the content management repository, enabling customers to manage content independently.
• Provides common web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to dramatically simplify application development.
• Is development platform and language agnostic.
• Supports composite application development and mash-ups by the business or IT analyst.
• Grows the ISV and developer community.