News

Microsoft Talks Services at TechEd

• By Chris Kanaracus
• 06/04/2007

Server and Tools Business chief Bob Muglia gave the keynote address Monday morning at Microsoft's Tech Ed 2007 Conference in Orlando, Fla. In doing so, Muglia often used terminology associated with service oriented architecture (SOA) -- words such as "agile," "user-focused," "service enabled" -- but rarely used the acronym itself.

"The thing to think about here is that it's very focused on real world things," Muglia said. "It's about how we can deliver things in the short run, but there is also a focus on long term plans."

Gartner analyst Tom Bittman took the stage for some brief remarks and hit upon the need for parceling out enterprise's technology needs into manageable form. "As we know, long-term projects in IT inevitably fail. We have to break it up into smaller chunks," Bittman said. Also, some 70 percent of IT budgets are currently spent on maintaining the status quo rather than working on new initiatives, the speakers said.

During his speech, Muglia also spent time describing Microsoft's software-plus-services strategy. "What we see as the future is that apps will have to be able to reach out and interact with consumers of many types," he said. "We've been using .NET as a foundation for this...As we move forward, we see services augmenting that environment, reaching all customers wherever they are."

While the overall theme of Muglia's talk centered on making enterprise IT agile and business-focused -- the oft-cited hallmarks of SOA -- the buzzword rarely came up.

Microsoft isn't trying to avoid the using the acronym, according to Steve Guggenheimer, General Manager, Application Platform and Dev Marketing. "The reason we use service-enabled instead of SOA is I don't think SOA is encompassing enough," he says.

Microsoft has some customers who wish to SOA-enable legacy assets and existing business processes to create composite applications, and others focused on applying SOA through Web services and mashup-type development, according to Guggenheimer. "We think about all of that as part of the service continuum," he said.

Microsoft did make a number of news announcements Monday, chief among them an agreement with Linux vendor Xandros to license Redmond's intellectual property for use in its Linux distribution.

Also Monday, the company announced the acquisition of Engyro Corp., a purchase that ties into Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager 2007.

The company also highlighted the availability of two CTPs released in recent weeks, one for the .NET Framework 3.5 and another for BizTalk Services.