OpenDDS in DDS Interoperability Demo at OMG

RESTON, VA - The Object Management Group (OMG) held its quarterly technical meeting here this week. One of its featured activities was a demonstration of interoperability between six vendors who have developed implementations of the OMG standard known as DDS (Data Distribution Service for Real-time Systems). This was the largest gathering and public demonstration of the standard's ability to support diverse implementations and installations of the products.

UPDATE:  OMG press release now available: http://www.omg.org/news/releases/pr2012/05-02-12.htm

The DDS interoperability standard is called DDSI (Data Distribution Service - Interoperability). It is sometimes known as RTPS, which is actually the acronym (Real-Time Publish/Subscribe) for the common wire protocol which is used in discovering other DDS systems and their topic offerings or subscriber needs. OpenDDS, the OCI open source DDS product, recently added this capability. OpenDDS successfully participated in the testing by being able to view multiple topics sourced from various vendor publishers and publishing its own topics to other vendor readers. 

DDSI enables large mixed systems to behave as one. Many organizations use this real-time publish and subscribe technology in their products, and support of DDSI will enable seamless operation of their DDS systems in other mixed environments.  DDSI and DDS are a part of the Department of Defense's Common Operating Environment (COE) standards. COE removes many of the impediments to integrating large scale systems.

Having an open source DDS product such as OpenDDS supporting DDSI will mean that clients can now add more cost effective elements to their pub/sub architectures without disturbing their proprietary legacy systems.

As one Navy Command CTO said, upon hearing the news: "You have mastered the world of open source, reuse, and agility." He then followed up with a comment regarding COE and standards, "If all vendors could achieve this, we could move the focus up to capabilities for DOD and stop wasting time on repeating infrastructures".

Dr. Ebrahim Moshiri, CEO of OCI, noted that, "Our mission is to empower our clients by leveraging our infrastructure related products and services. Our standards based, interoperable open source architectures are the lowest cost, safest way to build systems."

With the successful interoperability demonstration of OpenDDS, OCI was able to release version 3.1 of OpenDDS to its expanding user base.