Microsoft Unveils New 'Oslo' Approach to SOA

Published: October 31, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft yesterday unveiled "Oslo," the codename of a new group of products and technologies for creating service-oriented architectures (SOAs). Oslo won't introduce any new products, but rather refers to new releases of existing products, including BizTalk Server, the .NET Framework, and its Visual Studio development tools.

It's interesting to note that, as the rest of the industry has jumped on the SOA gravy train, Microsoft's vaunted marketing machine has avoided piling on, for the most part. In fact, when it comes to enabling SOA in the enterprise, some industry observers have criticized Microsoft for not taking a more active role and challenging IBM, which most analysts agree has a fairly sizable lead in SOA product development and deployments.

What's been the source of this lack of SOA at Microsoft? Has the company been showing admirable restraint by avoiding hyping a new approach to technology that has yet to be widely deployed or proved in the real world? (Doubtful.) Do Microsoft customers simply not suffer from the problem of legacy applications that SOA aims to solve? (Even more doubtful.) Or have the .NET-ites been caught flatfooted by SOA and outmaneuvered by the larger Java army? (More likely, but still not the complete answer.)

Whatever the reason for the lack of focus on SOA from Microsoft, the company appears ready to focus on SOA since it launched Oslo yesterday at the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters.

Microsoft describes Oslo as a multi-year roadmap that will see SOA enhancements made to existing products. Heading the list is the next release of BizTalk Server, which Microsoft would identify only as "6." (Presumably, "6" will eventually be called BizTalk Server 2008, but it appears Microsoft would rather hedge its bets against having to rename it by missing a shipment schedule. Previous releases--BizTalk Server 2002, BizTalk Server 2004, and BizTalk Server 2006--have followed an identifiable pattern.)

BizTalk Server is the closest thing Microsoft has to an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which is typically the key SOA component in a Java environment. While Microsoft eschews the ESB terminology, preferring instead Business Process Management (BPM), BizTalk Server will play a central role in developing, managing, and deploying composite applications as part of Oslo.

Microsoft is also lumping its recently announced BizTalk Services offering into Oslo. With BizTalk Services "1," Microsoft plans a series of Web services that make it easy for developers to add identity management, application-to-application messaging, and workflow capabilities into composite applications. BizTalk Services also plays prominently in two other distributed computing initiatives Microsoft has going, including "cloud computing" and "software plus services." To that end, Microsoft announced a new community technology preview (CTP) of BizTalk Services would be made available soon at labs.biztalk.net.

More SOA capabilities will debut with .NET Framework "4," which will contain new releases of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) components, as well as with Visual Studio "10." (Microsoft has already committed to delivering Visual Studio 2008, along with a new release of the database, SQL Server 2008, next year, so its choice of naming conventions is a bit confusing.) As is the case with the .NET Framework, Microsoft is touting a "model driven" approach to assembling composite applications.

Last but not least, Microsoft will debut a repository that will hold all the data and metadata needed to make the composite applications sing. This repository, which was not further identified, will work with BizTalk Server, Visual Studio, and the Microsoft System Center suite of management tools.

Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft Business Division, says the hope with Oslo is to deliver on the promises of SOA, despite the high level of complexity in IT today. "The combination of our current software-plus-services approach and the new wave of Oslo technologies will enable IT to deliver high-impact business solutions," he says.

It has yet to be seen if Oslo will be built on open standard technology, or if it will use proprietary technology developed by Microsoft. The proprietary approach could prove a difficult sell in today's widely heterogeneous computing environments.

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