The weight of a digital transformation looms over on-premises legacy infrastructure and vendors because, as Sid Nag, research VP at Gartner put it, “At this point, cloud adoption is mainstream.” The worldwide public cloud services market is forecast to grow 17% to $266.4 billion in 2020, up from $227.8 billion in 2019, according to Gartner.

In this not-so-distant future where cloud computing is created by open communities and directed by foundations, the question to be asked is who or what will bridge the gap between the creation and usage of open-source software?

Genesys, which specializes in customer service platforms, says universal adoption of an open-source data model will require the uniform development of standards to ensure interoperability across cloud applications — and most importantly — a nonpartisan residence for the open-source community.

As chance would have it, a most unlikely trio has formed to purvey the integration of data to the cloud. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Genesys, and Salesforce are working with the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation (JDF) to form the Cloud Information Model (CIM). 

The CIM aims to create a neutral home for the open-source community, offering common standards and source code to simplify how organizations connect data across multiple cloud platforms and disparate systems. And since data is still relatively disconnected and businesses are struggling to make decisions without knowing all the factors at play, demand for strategic cloud service outcomes signals an organizational shift toward digital business outcomes. 

Under JDF, developers can adopt and deploy CIM within days to create data lakes on AWS, generate analytics with Amazon Redshift, train machine learning (ML) models on Genesys, and build a single view of the customer through Salesforce’s Customer 360. This will save developers from spending months writing custom code.

Key to this plan is enabling vendor interoperability while also adhering to the regulatory requirements imposed on businesses. The CIM recognizes the role open data plays in allowing organizations to accomplish their business goals more efficiently and economically.

Genysys contends interoperability and providing personalization at scale will be a game changer for businesses, that is if the companies in the sandbox can play nice.

And although AWS, Genesys, and Salesforce all share a vested interest in expediting the transition to the cloud — along with heavy investments — it remains to be seen if a bully will emerge from the sandbox.