On the latest installment of the Converging On Microsoft podcast, Donald Lutz, CTO of Technetronic Solutions (one of a number of companies I advise), joins me to talk about building .Net applications using a SOA-based architecture and moving apps to the Software+Services model. Donald shares his views about building SOA and cloud services that don't look like typical applications. BizTalk isn't something we hear Microsoft talking about as much but it is a vital element of SOA and distributed cloud applications. If you are architecting or building SOA-based applications, you'll find this interview very interesting.
So just what are Microsoft's plans for BizTalk? Microsoft's expanded BizTalk to BizTalk Services, exposing services that live behind a firewall, across network boundaries or in the cloud itself. BizTalk has also been expanded with identity and workflow services. Gartner recently put Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant of the B2B Gateway Magic Quadrant. But BizTalk didn't play center stage at MIX08 to the degree it did at MIX07. How to effectively use an enterprise services bus like BizTalk can be somewhat of an enigma even to many of the internal Microsoft people I talk with.
The developer story aspect of Microsoft's online services and cloud initiatives hasn't really been unfolded by Ray Ozzie quite yet. I expect a lot of the announcements we will hear through the end of 2008 will pertain to development tools, frameworks and capabilities for creating cloud and Software+Services. And SOA-based architectures and ESBs like BizTalk are very important skills any architect or developer should have who's considering building applications and services for the cloud, which is why I'll be focusing more on this in upcoming podcasts.
Thanks for listening, and enjoy the podcast.
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Mitchell Ashley is principal consultant at Converging Network LLC where he provides product, technology and social media consulting to emerging technology companies. A successful CTO and product innovator, Mitchell has created many successful, award winning products in the networking, security, convergence, Internet and IT industries. In addition to blogging for NetworkWorld, Mitchell regularly blogs at TheConvergingNetwork and co-hosts the widely popular StillSecure After All These Years podcast.
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Hilarious sales-talk..
Hilarious and a lot of current(!) acronyms used. Like " SOA-based architecture" - that "A" already stands for an architecture. Does that "based" stand for another architecture? Actually, I'm a big SOA fan, but it is more (much more) than technology, especially more than just user experience or developer miracle solution!
Seriously, interesting and maybe I'm too old, all what was in this podcast is old, very old! Assuming, of course, that you were in that kind of business. I remember building mainframe clusters where the online did run in one and the services in other systems, adding the external (online, ATM) bank services to applications, adding the fax displays and sending to a person or a business, mail to offices and personnel, HR, accounting, security services, etc. You just build a small service, defined the displays, no need to write an application.
Or - maybe in JIT (just in time) for shipyards, laboratories, car manufacturing, paper and pulp, or a lift factory on other side of the globe, etc. Order your car with whatever color or tires in your teletext terminal, need a shipping for 100 tons of grade YYY paper to whatever country in next 24h, compare the deadlines to available workforce and reschedule the welders for that ship, make 8000 this type of TV's in next 6 hours and ship them to XXX country in 24 hours, whatever.. All the systems did talk the same language - except the text, that came later..
Or, maybe you had IBM, Honeywell, Tandem, Prime, etc systems in your banking infrastructure - use the systems transparently, the user doesn't really care, one terminal, one view - well, that was 80's.
And of course you have all the data and interfaces defined in repositories, catalogs, dictionaries, .. whatever name is suitable. The application writers just copy, include, etc those and write the business rules.
So - nothing (much) has changed except new acronyms for things which were available a long time ago (metadata is not a new concept.) Now - much of that is marketing, instead of functionality, people want "nice", colorful, pleasing, blah, blah, user interfaces - if that makes profits, it's OK, but at least, from IT point of view it just means more work and, as we have seen, some security problems.
As they say...
I enjoyed your comment. You know, technology never goes away, it just gets renamed. I guess that's why we have the saying, "whats old is new again." :)
Mitchell Ashley
Converging Network, LLC
Personal blog: http://theconvergingnetwork.com
Personal podcast: http://www.clickcaster.com/ss
As they say and..
Thanks - yes, technology never goes away. It is like what I argued on one of the internet patents, Phoenicians used the technology splitting a ticket to half to prove the authentication of both parties a long (a very long) time ago, now, a patent was allowed to use the same idea, they didn't have internet at that time (heh!) but just the same idea. It's almost like if you go from a personal contact to phone, fax, HDLC, SDLC, IP, HTTP, whatever - someone thinks that the basic idea is new?
Just bothers me a little (not much, as a vendor representative I have done the same) - it is just that it seems too easy, make a new buzzword and you can sell an old idea again.
SOA (a common sense architecture), SaaS or S+S - give me a break, I managed hundreds of external services in our mainframes in 70's (online and services running somewhere else is nothing new - actually used to be part of recovery, switch the provider if one is not currently working, etc!), I designed and managed systems integration for a lot of customers in 80's, most global. I learned a lot of airlines managing workforces, spare parts, flight and customer scheduling globally, building country wide government and army systems, global manufacturing "just in time" in 70's and 80's, connecting banks to ATMs and to the world wide banking network, etc in 70's and 80's - show me something new - except, of course, nice graphical interfaces!
The personal problem I have with "new" technologies is that it is definitely too much product oriented - technology is easy, making it work for you is not always so easy especially if you don't know more than one or are stuck to one! Learning technology takes days, learning how best to use it takes much longer. And I think that's the IT problems today - not much different from dot.com days, IT just have to start (again) think business not products, acronyms, abbreviations, whatever!
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