The GODAE (Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment) project has operated for a decade to establish a common definition and description of what is a GODAE ocean data product, and tuned each production center to routinely serve quality-controlled ocean data. A legacy of GODAE has been in harmonizing the various products and the development of essential and generic functions to connect users to products tackling the problem of both the diversity of ocean data and volume of data flows. The European directive 'Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) and the IOOS Data Management And Communication plan issues (DMAC) have defined the (distributed) architecture to serve data geospatially referenced. Since 2007, the two of them enter the implementation phase, addressing 3 technical issues to solve the problem of interoperability b,etween software applications, across different organization: the metadata, the ontology, and the service bus. Pursuing their quest, the GODAE community is setting up large size structuring / implementation projects or programs in Europe. Those projects work on previously-addressed issues, with the goals of sharing expertise, reducing production costs, and producing high-quality, well-described, peer-reviewed datasets. Data sets are referenced in a central system which is developing an interoperable interface to discover, access and view them. The near future will also see a strong move towards “operationalization” of the various data systems and the management of the timelines/accessibility criteria. The main challenge, however, for the future success of operational oceanography, is dependent upon the community to work together, to maintain a network of experts and to agree upon common approaches. The community therefore expresses recommendations or priority actions on how they envisioned the next steps in harmonization/standardization to help forge and tied up the links as well as to go on the convergence of solution and tools for efficient and sustainable marine core services.