No single vendor can any longer provide "best" solutions for the biggest problems at scale. Proprietary systems and lack of standards support are no longer tolerable. The world is interconnected and full-scale metadata indexing enables interoperability. Interoperability thus requires:

General Standards Support

• Complete XML compliance; RDF and OWL where appropriate
• Semantic Web and BPEL where appropriate
• Compliance with various JSRs (e.g., 168, 170) where appropriate
• Completely documented APIs for major work engines.

Loosely-coupled Integration

• Recommended where performance is not critical and vendors participate at "arm's length"
• Differentiators in BrightPlanet’s approach includes: 1) full adherence to standards; and 2) complete documentation
• Effective integration uses a "federation of federation" standards; single standards alone pose unacceptable friction
• Architectural design is pivotal to acceptable costs (e.g., avoid J2EE on most servers and design around per-CPU licensing costs).

Tightly-coupled Integration

• Low-level APIs and canonical data transfer forms are used for efficient network scalability, performance
• Based on core understanding of performance optimizations, trade-offs.

BrightPlanet’s research in these areas is only minimally geared to standards evaluations; these are already well developed in most areas.

What is lacking are complete systems – “recipe books” if you will – that combine prescriptive directions to combined standards usage with utilities and tools to facilitate that adoption. Knowing an alphabet soup of requirements is not helpful; knowing how to make a meal is. If properly constructed, such “recipe books” can shift the onus of standards compliance to the market, and not as a limited choice by the central sponsor or funding agency