Golden-Orb seeks to be vendor and platform agnostic - using Golden-Orb means you are not locked into expensive licensing structures or beholden to any one particular technology vendor. Our technologies are open standards based. We are committed to these technologies because this enables us to deliver to our clients maximum flexibility and return on their investment.

Ensuring that your technology platform is built on Open Standards based technologies is critical for sustained growth, business agility and future proofing your information technology investments.

Open Standards are important for building flexible and future proof technology architecture. Using Open Standards based technologies means you can:

A) Minimize the threat of vendor “lock in” - Every computer company, whether hardware vendor or software vendor, plays the "customer lock-in" game to some degree or other. The object of “customer lock in” is to foster customer dependence on technology that only one company can deliver.

Historically, software vendors have designed and developed their systems in ways that ensure the customer is always dependent on their expertise and technology. These systems are propriety, they use internal and proprietary standards that cannot be inspected, evaluated or used without a license. These standards can be changed at will and without notification - and are!

Modifications to internal and proprietary standards are the hooks that enable vendors to force customer upgrades and can also be used to prevent backward file interoperability.

Hence if a customer has limited or no access to underlying data structures, and/or does not ensure their vendor adheres to agreed Open Standards, dependent and monopoly relationship between the vendor and customer can exist. Subscribing to proprietary solutions in this manner leaves a customer vulnerable to expensive licensing structures, and beholden to their vendor. One simple example is that your IT budget can be consumed simply by having to continue with the licensing regime of your existing systems and infrastructure.

With Open Standards, organisations can select best of breed solutions that minimise the threat of a vendor exploiting your dependency on their proprietary solutions. This does not mean that all closed standard solutions are a bad choice, however organizations need to consider the potential risks of closed or proprietary standards based solutions.

All of Golden-Orb’s solutions are based on open standards.

B) Seamless interoperatibililty – Application interoperability or the ability to simply “plug and play” between disparate systems and information is a vital part of being agile and competitive in today’s global economy.

Adherence to Open Standards enhances and delivers improved interoperability. The use of Open Standards in the application development process also promotes code re-usability and minimizes development time and costs, whilst improving software quality.

The emerging Web Services technologies and their successful use very much hinges on the development and adoption of Open Standards.

Our Open Standards approach is one of the factors why we are at the very leading edge of Web Services development.

C) Maximum Resource Usage - When organizations adopt a standards based approach to solving their technology challenges they can leverage and protect their investments. Quite simply, more can be done with less, because everything that is done, is done in a consistent and transferable way.

For example, the costs of training staff to learn new technologies are dramatically reduced because there is no need to learn highly specialized propriety skill sets. In summary, our clients can effectively reduce costs resulting in increased return on investment and improved competitive advantage.

D) Ubiquity and Platform Independence - Real Open Standards based approaches tend to deliver platform and device independence hence ubiquity of solution – this means real returns real time.

Through Golden-orb’s Open Standards approach, methodologies and frameworks we can deliver you increased business agility and real return on your investment.

Open Source (as opposed to Open Standards) Software (such as the Linux operating system kernel) is also being increasingly used by organizations to remedy this 'vendor lock-in' situation, as well as dramatically reducing licensing costs.

Where appropriate, we at Golden-Orb use open source software (eg Linux, PHP, MySQL, Apache, JBoss) that enable us to directly translate these cost savings to our clients.

For more information on open standards and open source link to next article over page Open Standards and Open Source - What is the Difference.