23 April 2007 - 15:47Microsoft on SOA

I was listening to this podcast on the MWD blog, a podcast with Kris Horrocks from Microsoft. I find it weird given the reputation that MS has in enterprise computing, but this is the first podcast with a vendor involved in SOA which stands out.
Some points that I extracted from it:
1) Microsoft seems pretty serious about inter-operability.
2) SOA is all about managing relationships between various IT environments (this was not explicit in the podcast, but I ended up with this impression). I have the impression that the drop in the cost of telecommunications spawned the interactions between IT departments within a company as well as in different companies. (This is a minor point though).
3) I really liked the part (this was toward the end of the podcast) about having a management console which can be used for admin-ing different Microsoft products such as SQL Server or Biz Talk server. I got the impression of a management abstraction layer that gets put on top of an application so that you can plug this application into an operational environment easily. The admin tasks from Biztalk server must be different from the ones from SQL server (I’d be very surprised if Biztalk Server needs to handle roll-back segments, datafiles, etc…), but there are quite a few which are similar: transaction thru-put and a few other examples in the podcast seemed to make a lot of sense. I really liked this part, MS seems pretty serious about management. (As a side note, I would assume that they found a way to delegate management concerns that fall outside the scope of their management console to someone that could handle them.)

I get the impression that MS will actually make a pretty important contribution to SOA, and that it will be in management where it will occur. SOA could be the means thru which MS will break into enterprise computing.