Microsoft slouches towards SOA
So Microsoft is finally out of the closet. After years of shrugging off any enquiries about SOA and preferring instead to talk exclusively about something called "service orientation", the company has put its name to a
SOA conference which ran last week in Redmond. It's really a BizTalk and Office conference, actually, but SOA (and BPM) are big themes.
It's a big moment for SOA. Microsoft traditionally eschews the big software platform buzz-phrases - it never talked about having an application server, for example, or an Application Platform Suite - preferring to leave the mouth-frothing and feverish-attention-grabbing to the Java crowd - but it seems that SOA's momentum has finally made it explicitly hitch itself to the SOA wagon.
Not without a bit of a side-swipe at the current SOA tooling players, though. The news release that accompanied the staging of the conference made reference to Microsoft's "real world" approach to SOA - in contrast to other vendors' approaches which "major on the need for large scale enterprise infrastructures". I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with the fact that Microsoft's real strengths lie in its relationships with developers, in contrast with the "enterprise infrastructure" strengths of competitors like BEA, IBM, TIBCO et al...
John deVadoss, Microsoft's director of architecture strategy, talked about an "industry dialogue around large-scale SOA implementations not delivering the promised return" and positioned Microsoft's strategy as being much more about helping customers take incremental steps towards SOA.
I think this is a case of Microsoft attempting to invent an industry narrative that doesn't exist, in an attempt to convince its "public" that a developer-focused approach is the best way to go. But none of the companies I've talked to are dumb enough to try and re-engineer their entire organisations' IT infrastructures top-down in some kind of elephantine SOA engineering folly. Hell, *any* big-bang infrastructure reengineering project generally falls on its backside: unless you're in a privileged position and are able to build a new company from the ground up you have to take a stepwise approach, justifying the business value of incremental investments as you go. That's the same for SOA as anything else. But the truth is, you need an approach that puts the right tools into the hands of developers as well as the right infrastructure (among many other things) - SOA success can't be reduced to a question of "developers first" or "infrastructure first".
