Here at Cutting Edge we have a lot of exciting technological developments and innovations to share. At the top of the list for me is the Symantec Open Collaborative Architecture (OCA), which prescribes a technology direction to enable collaboration among Symantec products and third-party and partner products.
The architecture is based on a loosely coupled interoperability model that requires products to adhere to a limited set of technology requirements in order to be considered OCA-enabled. The Symantec OCA enables products to interoperate for the purpose of data/information sharing among multiple products. This allows task and operational control of one product to be initiated by another product while creating loosely integrated process automation solutions for IT domain-specific processes, as prescribed in ITIL, for example. Working across IT domains, sharing and exchanging data, and enabling automation all contribute to greater cost effectiveness and risk management for the enterprise.Open Collaborative Architecture is neither a product nor a solution in itself and cannot be purchased independently of the products that adopt its technologies. The idea is to prescribe an evolutionary approach to interoperability and solution construction, building on the Altiris solution model that is available today. As a common solutions and software architecture, the OCA enables various forms and multiple models for interoperability, none of which are mutually exclusive.Using standard technologies around web services, web-based security, workflow management, and configuration management, the OCA provides greater flexibility and openness to build complex, multi-disciplinary, and multi-vendor solutions that can be tailored to meet specific business needs.