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Common Questions

1. Name
2. Title, Company, Position
3. Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?
4. How long have you been involved with OSLC?
5. In what way(s) are you involved with OSLC?
6. What made you decide to get involved OSLC?
7. How did you find out about OSLC?
8. How has OSLC been valuable to your organization?
9. How do you expect OSLC to benefit your organization in the future?
10. What do you like about OSLC?
11. What is next for you with OSLC?
12. What would you like to see OSLC do next?
13. What did I not ask that you would like to share with me about OSLC?

Interview Transcripts

Steve Speicher

Response received via email January 24, 201

1. Name?
Steve Speicher

2. What's your title?
STSM, Rational OSLC Lead Architect, IBM

3. Can you tell me a little bit about what you do for OSLC?
I lead both the Core and Change Management working groups. I have lead the creation of the first ever OSLC specification in CM 1.0 and have participated in a number of working groups including the Core WG from its inception. I have lead a development team in their development of OSLC CM. I also do a good amount of enablement work for 3rd parties in sharing strategies and architectures for possible solutions to build.

4. In your words, what does OSLC offer? Either philosophically or directly?
The two main things OSLC offers is an open community to develop interoperable specifications and from a technical perspective, a solid foundation to build interoperable solutions. The combination of these two things is immense and they greatly compliment each other.

5. If OSLC is evolving, can you tell me where it's been, where its at, and where you hope to be in the next few years?
Since I have been involved since near the beginning, it has changed quite a bit in some ways and held true to its initial goals as well. It's message and purpose resonates well with customers, we just need to get more tools and applications supporting it. I hope that over the next few years, we'll have ubiquitous set of tools supporting it and have evolved to a basis supported by linked data standard.

6. What is your favorite thing about OSLC? ( if needed: service, technology, community...)
Community, without it the technology, scenarios supporting it, the implementations validating it...would all be invalid.

7. In telling the OSLC story, is there anything that you feel has to be said...that we haven't talked about?
I think one message that often gets lost, is that you really don't need any special software or products from one vendor to benefit from OSLC. I've been contacted by a tools architect at a company who was looking at standardizing their tools architecture based on OSLC, even though they had only 1 tool in their company that had support for OSLC (that being the MantisBT? ).

8. If you could compel someone to participate in the OSLC community, what would you say or share with that person?
One way in the world, especial in community and standardization effort, to get something done is to take some time and participate. If there are integration scenarios you'd like to see work with specified minimal interfaces, then bring those scenarios to the community and work through the community on what needs to happen to develop specifications to support it.

9. What would you like to see OSLC do next?
Since I'm involved heavily in the specification efforts, I'd like OSLC to evolve both vertically and horizontally. What do I mean by that? I think that the techniques and technologies apply to cross-industry solutions, beyond PLM/ALM. I also believe to achieve that, some of the specification content needs to make its way to standards organizations like W3C? to help promote that technology more broadly.

10. What did I not ask that you would like to share with me about OSLC?
When looking for open integration solutions for PLM/ALM tools, the choices are quite limited today and some of those choices provide a pretty high barrier for tools to participate. OSLC tries to keep that barrier low and therefore, I believe there really isn't any competing effort.

Wesley Coelho

Response recieved via email, Feb 3, 2012

1. Name

Wesley Coelho

2. Title, Company, Position

Director, Business Development, Tasktop Technologies

3. Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?

I help organizations deliver sophisticated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration solutions powered by the thriving community of both open and closed source extensions to the Eclipse Mylyn project. Mylyn is the open source ALM integration framework created and led by Tasktop with 1m monthly downloads and more than 70 integrations.

4. How long have you been involved with OSLC?

I have been involved in OSLC since mid-2009 when Tasktop endorsed the effort and began contributing to the specification and communicating how organizations benefit from it.

5. In what way(s) are you involved with OSLC?

As a member of the OSLC Communications Workgroup I have been supporting the effort to evangelize and raise awareness of OSLC and help organizations understand how to leverage it. As an organization, Tasktop contributes to the OSLC specification and makes use of it in several products.

6. What made you decide to get involved OSLC?

The need for OSLC is obvious with the diverse set of enterprise, best-of-breed, and legacy ALM tools prevalent in a majority of organizations. As a provider of integration solutions, we know the pain associated with integrating disparate systems. OSLC provides a way to ease that pain through standardized specifications. Because OSLC is open, we saw an opportunity to get involved and contribute our experience in this area to shape the specification to meet our needs.

7. How did you find out about OSLC?

8. How has OSLC been valuable to your organization?

OSLC has reduced our development effort and time to market by providing a standardized way of interacting with ALM systems. In several cases it has provided a cost-effective option for integration solutions where alternative approaches would not have been viable.

9. How do you expect OSLC to benefit your organization in the future?

As the OLSC specification becomes more broadly implemented, we’ll be able to take advantage of it for more of our products and further reduce the development effort associated with new integrations. Meanwhile, we are developing a unique solution that leverages OSLC and the community of Mylyn integrations to provide OSLC connectivity across multi-vendor and open source solutions even when the specification isn’t yet supported.

10. What do you like about OSLC?

For our particular application of OSLC, the advantage is its simplicity. OSLC advocates a “link” integration strategy where external data is referenced but not replicated. This completely avoids a range of difficult complexities that associated with replication solutions, resulting in simple interoperability that is easy to set up.

11. What is next for you with OSLC?

Tasktop is looking forward to rapidly expanding the reach of OSLC-enabled applications via a new solution that combines OSLC with the diverse community of Mylyn integrations.

12. What would you like to see OSLC do next?

13. What did I not ask that you would like to share with me about OSLC?