Microsoft's SOA Strategy

Blogger: Chris Haddad

After Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business (STB) analyst summit (held in early June), I wasn’t the only person wondering if Microsoft is heading in the right direction. Ron and Judith have concerns as well. While we share a common theme, our perspective and confidence on Microsoft’s ability to articulate and execute a SOA strategy differ.

Microsoft’s states their strategic direction is in ‘Making a new class of model-driven and service-enabled applications mainstream’ and enabling ‘Real World SOA’. At a vision level, Microsoft understands service-orientation and adoption challenges. They are also focused on enabling a pragmatic approach to achieve success [1]. Microsoft has always been extremely successful at enabling productive and efficient development of discrete applications and services. Early ‘real world service-oriented’ success stories capitalize on faster integration through web services and realizing re-use across a limited number of consuming systems. Over the last five years, web service based integration has been adopted by mainstream developers, yet development teams have not yet transitioned their software assets to realize a flexible and agile architecture. The market message describing ‘the value of SOA’ is evolving to focus on the ‘architectural aspects’.

To obtain agility, development teams must reduce complexity. Complexity increases the time and effort required to enhance or modify applications and services. Service-oriented patterns to reduce complexity include:

Re-use and share existing software assets

Consolidate duplicative software assets

Conform projects to common standards

According to Microsoft, the Oslo vision is to “Significantly simplify the effort required to design, build, deploy and manage distributed applications within and across organizations.” [2] Microsoft’s challenge is to re-align their product portfolio to support a cross-project, portolio-oriented view of software assets and enable re-use through intuitive matching of project requirements to service definition. Being able to expose, compose, and consume services in a more rapid, simple manner will not demonstrate recognizable business value. After all, most development teams right now cannot quantify ‘how fast’ they develop service providers and consumers. Also, developing 'more services faster', without considering the set of existing service capabilities, keeps programmers employed, but is a stratgy which doesn't simplify a company's software portfolio (aka a clear path to code bloat).

At a strategy level Microsoft describes Service Oriented Architecture as “a standards-based design approach to creating an integrated IT infrastructure capable of rapidly responding to changing business needs. SOA provides the principles and guidance to transform a company's existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and inflexible IT resources into integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources that can be changed and composed to more directly support business goals.” [1] While Burton Group agrees with Microsoft’s strategic statement, we feel Microsoft must invest more time to clearly articulate their view of SOA principles, how their product roadmap will be realigned to support service-orientation, and describe fundamental architectural service-oriented building blocks required to realize value. Current industry dissatisfaction with Microsoft’s SOA direction is due to a lack of communication. To demonstrate progress towards their strategic vision, Microsoft must better communicate how Visual Studio and BizTalk Server will align with Microsoft’s Oslo initiative. While Microsoft states development using Microsoft’s products will be ‘business driven’, include ‘next generation declarative languages’, and 'place models in a repository', an effective SOA strategy must also include ‘software asset discovery and visualization’, integrate various ‘service model perspectives’, and a present a ‘portfolio oriented view'. We look forward to Microsoft articulating a broader set of service-oriented principles and goals (i.e. beyond current web services and interoperability messagae), a relationship between goals/architecture/business value, and an enabling product/framework roadmap as they did with their prior ground breaking initiative, Indigo (aka Windows Communication Foundation).

[1]Microsoft SOA FAQ http://www.microsoft.com/soa/about/faq.aspx#soafaq

[2] Oslo Backgrounder, November 2007, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/soa-bpm/docs/OsloBG.doc