In today’s connected world, interoperability is as important as security and reliability for IT professionals . This is due to an increase in technical heterogeneity which drives more complexity within, and on the edge of, their IT infrastructures. This leads to a greater demand for data and information integration as organizations seek to optimize process performance. Heterogeneity also leads to increased demands on information technology vendors who must ensure that their solutions are capable of successfully working in a mixed IT environment. To address these demands, Microsoft’s vision is to address interoperability holistically in order to better connect people, data, and diverse systems.
Connecting people describes the workflows and collaboration that takes place within and among organizations at the ‘people’ level. Connecting data describes the need to integrate data stores, optimize information flow, and to address semantic issues that arise with structured (e.g. databases) and unstructured data(e.g. files). Connecting diverse systems speaks to both technical and operational processes ranging from simple connectivity between internal systems, to value chain work flows.