A group of 10 companies have formed an alliance to improve open source enterprise applications.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) believes the market for open source business products is still in its infancy. It will work on defining and promoting best practise and frameworks to improve interoperability between applications.

It says individual companies and applications have had some success, but the industry needs bundles of properly interoperable applications which can be installed easily.

The OSA will also organise joint marketing campaigns and organise "meta-communities" of companies and individuals working in the same areas.

The 10 founding members of the group are: Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net®, SpikeSource ,and Talend. Unisys has also signed up.

The alliance was officially launched 7 February, but is still seeking more companies to sign up.

There's more on its website here (http://www.opensolutionsalliance.org/). ®

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