The increasing capabilities and quality of information technology has thrown integration endeavour to a top priority (total integration trend). However, the lack of time to mature consensus and the market dynamics, has led to technological dependencies (vendor lock-in). Over the past few years, a variety of new concepts, paradigms, methodologies and technologies have contributed to unique information technology (IT) solutions. One main research question is how to establish an open development landscape for the emergent complex integrated IT system of systems under vendor agnostic models (openness). The Collaborative Enterprise Development Environment (CEDE) is a research effort towards a unified development culture (based on conformity certifications). The strategy is complementary to existing standardizations processes and is based on promoting an open (unified) collaborative development environment.