Tuesday, 17 July 2007

Microsoft To Launch ‘Shrink-Wrapped’ SOA By September

Microsoft is setting its sight on the Service Oriented Architecture market by launching what it calls ‘Shrink Wrapped SOA’ by September. According to reports, Microsoft’s new Service-Oriented Architecture & Business Process pack consists of an array of the company’s core development tools and back-end components, along with guidance materials for creating SOAs.

Microsoft’s SOA and Business Process pack includes BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (its Enterprise Service Bus), SharePoint Server 2007, Visual Studio Team System, SQL Server 2005, the .NET Framework and four Office Business Applications Reference Application Packs, which are Microsoft guidelines for developing programs on top of Office 2007.

For Microsoft, getting into the SOA space is quite logical. There is a lot of interest in SOA, which typically are companies seeking commodity-priced solutions to problems. Burley Kawasaki, director of product management at Microsoft said, “We get a lot of questions from partners and users about what part of the Microsoft stack should they use for SOA projects or how to use them together, and what are the right scenarios for doing a SOA project. We are trying to codify our experience and create an integrated licensing offering so you can buy a single SKU and have all the software you need … We think this pack can be a platform for building Office-based composite apps on top of an SOA infrastructure including SharePoint, and use Visual Studio tools for modifying and building Office applications.