Waters Wrap: What’s going on ‘Here’? Examining interop’s next move

While I obviously enjoy writing about the application interoperability space, the most frustrating aspect is that the vendors supplying interop tools sure do love a good name change. That said, what’s in a name can sometimes reflect broader trends in the industry.

A little over a week ago, desktop app interop vendor OpenFin announced it was changing its name to Here. This was a confusing move (at least to me, anyway). Why abandon a well-established brand for a name that basically spits in the eye of search engine optimization?

Mazy Dar, Here’s CEO, told me the company had outgrown the OpenFin moniker. At its core, interoperability aims to create an environment where various third-party and internally built applications can seamlessly share information. Companies like OpenFin would place a container on the desktop so that all apps in that container could “talk” to one another. So, as its now-former name would suggest, OpenFin wanted to open up the financial firm’s desktop and allow best-of-breed solutions to work together in harmony.

While that ethos may still be alive, Dar said it was the “Fin” piece that became a sticking point for the vendor’s growth plans. In November 2022, OpenFin announced it had signed a partnership with venture capital firm In-Q-Tel (IQT), a taxpayer-funded government entity that invests in the intelligence community. OpenFin had also made inroads with healthcare companies, call centers, and wealth management firms. And it wants to keep on expanding.

“We love the name, but we realized that we’ve outgrown the name,” Dar said. “If you were a trading platform or a trading desk at a bank, would you then put all of your mission-critical software onto something called ‘OpenHealth’ or ‘OpenTravel’? We needed a name that is not industry-specific, that is not ‘fin’ specific.”

Adam Toms, Here’s COO, told me that while Here has a lot of growing still to do at banks and asset managers—specifically around HR, compliance, KYC/AML, or call centers—it’s following a common playbook used by other software-as-a-service providers.

“If you look at any big SaaS company out there like Salesforce or ServiceNow, financial services is their biggest sector,” Toms said. “So we’ve started with a great strength in one of the biggest sectors, and we still have a lot of growing to do there, but we’re also seeing a lot of interest from other sectors.”

What’s in a browser?

Name changes are interesting enough—even if a bit infuriating for journalists … get the hell outta here, “X”—but the meat of the OpenFin-to-Here announcement was not in re-branding. At the same time, the vendor took the opportunity to announce the launch of its Here Enterprise Browser.

Remember how I was talking about desktop containers? Well, Here wants to expand that offering to the interop browser space—and here (no pun intended) is where things can get a bit confusing.

I’ll break down the app interop vendor space into three companies: Here, Interop.io (which is the result of the Finsemble–Glue42 merger), and a startup called Connectifi. From here, there’s an important distinction to be made: Do you run in a browser, or are you a browser?

The Here Enterprise Browser is, indeed, itself a browser, similar to what enterprise browser Island.io has made headlines for building.

Containerization is not dead. What we’re doing now is saying, ‘OK, that interoperability that you’ve been using … within what we provide at OpenFin, that’s built right into the web browser’

Mazy Dar, Here

“The direction of travel is in the enterprise browser space,” Dar said. “There’s an increasing understanding that internet web browsers are not the best tools for work. You really need another kind of browser that is specific for work. So we also wanted a name that sits comfortably alongside Chrome, Edge, Slack, and other horizontal tools that are in that space.”

According to the company, Here is a browser just like Chrome, Edge or Safari. It doesn’t run inside another browser. You launch the Here Enterprise Browser in the same way you would launch a browser, by double-clicking its desktop icon. The vendor says the experience, although familiar, includes capabilities not available in traditional browsers, including supertabs, signals, deep search, a dedicated notification center, app integrations (e.g., MS365, Salesforce, etc.) and enterprise controls for additional security. Signals are built on the FDC3 standard and allow for context sharing and intents.

“Containerization is not dead,” Dar said. “What we’re doing now is saying, ‘OK, that interoperability that you’ve been using … within what we provide at OpenFin, that’s built right into the web browser.’ There’s Chrome and Edge and other browsers out there, but they don’t have that interoperability layer where the apps can share data, share context, share workflow—we do.”

OpenFin was all about interoperability on the desktop. If you tried sharing context between an app on the desktop and, say, an iPad, it wouldn’t work. Now, to be sure, the Here browser is built on top of that desktop container. But in the past, OpenFin would provide users with the container and a bank or asset manager would build its own web browser on top, Dar said. When the company introduced “Workspace”—not to be confused with Refinitiv’s Workspace collaboration platform—it was an effort to make life easier for clients because they didn’t have to build the entire web browser.

“With the Here Enterprise Browser, we’re starting on the desktop, there is going to be a mobile version of it, and you’ll be able to share context from the desktop to the mobile version with our cloud interoperability,” Dar said.

Workspace provided a visual interface since clients were essentially doing the same thing. This gave them a starting point, and they could customize it for their needs.

“With Enterprise Browser now, it’s the next phase: We never used to provide anything on the back end—every bank, every asset manager that has ever used OpenFin was building their own back end. [So, for example] authentication, analytics, audit, entitlements, notification services, places to save and store your layouts, and all the rest of it. It actually ends up being a fair amount of work,” Dar said. “What we’re doing now with the Enterprise Browser is [offering a service] that is fully hosted—fully turn-key. You don’t have to build any of that back end; it just works. You can put your apps into it, but you don’t have to build your own browser.”

Let me say that I’m not here (pun intended) to make judgements as to whether the browser “just works”—that’s for users to decide, and then they can feed back their experiences to me. But this is the way that Here is positioning itself in its next stage.

Now, let me bring in Interop.io and Connectifi, and we’ll start with the former.

I’m not here (pun intended) to make judgements as to whether the browser ‘just works’—that’s for users to decide, and then they can feed back their experiences to me

Dan Schleifer, president and cofounder of Interop.io, had this to say about his company’s offering: “Nowadays, everybody has a modern, Chromium-based browser on their desktop, so the question is: Do you just use that or do you use a desktop [interface] and install it? We have a desktop framework. Most of our customers choose to use the desktop. They do that because they have a lot of desktop applications still. [For example], most of what a fixed-income trader runs is not browser-based software; it’s not web software. It is .Net, Java, C++ desktop applications, and maybe 20–25% of the applications that they run are built in web technology.”

While I was speaking to Schleifer, he was at the the Fixed Income Leaders Summit in Boston, where he moderated a roundtable of end-users, asking them about the number of applications they use. The numbers came in between 5 and 15, and a mix of browser apps and desktop apps.

“With our io.Connect desktop, you can run modern web-based applications, and you can run .Net, Java, C++ ‘legacy’ applications, and run them side by side as first-class citizens within an interoperable environment,” Schleifer said. “That’s how you build a smart desktop out of a heterogenous mix of applications.”

The io.Connect Browser is not a browser—it runs in a browser like Chrome, Edge, or Safari. Schleifer said a user can also connect applications that are run in a traditional browser with certain desktop applications like, say, Bloomberg. For example, if a user has a web-based application running in Chrome, with the click of a button, they can send a message to Bloomberg. But not all native applications on the desktop work that way, which is why he says “a lot of clients” still use the desktop version of io.Connect.

“Legacy software exists—it’s not going away. By the time what we think legacy software is today goes away, the stuff that we’re building today will be considered legacy by then,” Schleifer said. “There is no, ‘we arrive at a place where everything is brand new and modern.’”

And then there’s Connectifi. Some people might protest my putting the vendor in the same league as Here and Interop.io (at least they still have their original name!), but its CEO and cofounder, Nick Kolba, has serious interop bona fides. (Click here for info on that.)

Connectifi is looking to depart from the container technology—mainly Electron—that has underpinned the “financial smart desktop” since the beginning, in favor of cloud, a technology more favored by banks, asset managers, exchanges, and vendors. 

Here’s how Kolba describes his company: “We’re a cloud service. We’re not dependent on an installed client. Applications, wherever they’re running, can connect into the service and securely interop using FDC3 or [some other open standard],” he told me last week. And a quick note to readers that have made it this far: I’m not going to get into FDC3 or the challenges of using the standard in a traditional web browser. It will bog things down, but know that is the problem Connectifi is trying to solve.

“When I say running FDC3 in a browser, I’m saying you can open it up in Chrome or Edge or Safari, and it will just work, which means that you will enjoy all the other stuff those browsers enjoy, including the fact that you can use it with the rest of your workflow,” he said. “These things can just stay where they are—they don’t have to move to some other thing in order to work with other stuff. This is the approach Connectifi is taking. You can put a very lightweight agent from Connectifi into your legacy application and have it be able to interoperate with anything else; nothing has to move.”

Three different companies. Three different ideas as to how best to interoperate. Here’s what I would like to know from you, dear reader: Do you care about these distinctions? Are these simply different strokes for different folks? Is there room for everyone? Or are you a purist? Can there (or at least should there) be only one?

If you have some thoughts (even off the record), hit me up: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com.