Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

PDC announcements have been made that begin to shed some light (small aperture stuff) on the whole mystery on OSLO. However before I get into discussing what might become apparent at the PDC let me digress a moment into a discussion on what constitutes an Enterprise and whether SOA is exclusively a valid Enterprise concept.

What constitutes an Enterprise?

3 Developers, 80 staff, 12 million per annum revenue == Enterprise ?

5 Developers, 120 staff, 17 million per annum revenue == Enterprise ?

7 Developers, 200 staff, 22 million per annum revenue == Enterprise ?

10, Developers, 300 staff, 50 million per annum revenue == Enterprise ?

15 Developers, 1000 staff, etc ?

What’s interesting to me is that you will find development teams and managers in any of the categories above, that want to connect applications in the organisation  (enterprise or whatever you want to call it) and believe that they are equally entitled to be thinking about SOA as the CIO of any large Telco or public / private Utility.

Recently I posted a suggestion that if BizTalk had an express version, then it would have "crossed the chasm" en masse some time ago. The question I pose now is what are Microsoft’s plan for BizTalk licensing given the positioning they have given the product within the context of Oslo? Based on the official documentation to date and working on the assumption that there is no change to the status quo to the licensing strategy around BizTalk, then Oslo seems to be limiting it’s audience somewhat. Quite a few of the organisations (Enterprise) listed above, will have a hard time justifying the cost of BizTalk licensing and will be faced with finding alternatives. Let’s face it, there are more businesses in these categories above than any other and it’s also representative of the vast majority of Microsoft’s constituency, so the questions have to be asked, just how central to Oslo will BizTalk be and what will it cost? I note that the roadmap does not include answers to these questions and I dare say that the PDC wont devote a lot of attention to it either but here’s hoping.

The technology that lies at the heart of Oslo is being listed as BizTalk Server V6, System Centre V5, Visual Studio V10, BizTalk Services V1, and the .NET 4.0  Framework. Oslo seems constrained to providing updates to existing technology and providing some new ones, both forming the parts in creating your own SOA soup. Certainly there seems to be no mention or evidence of a framework per se and I cant help but wonder if this isn’t one of the missing elements in their general approach. Certainly it has opened up the way for both open source and 3rd party commercial frameworks / products such as nServiceBus, Simple Service Bus, Neudesic Neuron ESB, Mass Transit and Linxter amongst them. I know nServiceBus reasonable well and it  addresses some of the key problems when faced with building a fluent service based eco system in your organisation and whilst it is early days yet, I can help but notice that Redmond would appear to be taking a heavily technological approach to the problem space. My hope is that the idea of messaging being about web services ‘everywhere’ with a whole lot of orchestration, becomes consigned to the past and that we become the beneficiaries of real pub sub with WCF providing the message transports and perhaps even BizTalk Express filling in the durable pub / sub piece of the architecture?

Some of the things imagineered into Oslo so far are BizTalk deployment of Workflow to Server farms, BAM type monitoring of Workflow, more visual Workflow design tools and an online repository for storage of message contracts , workflow’s, service publications /subscriptions and discovery (ciao UDDI?).

I look forward to seeing what the PDC will unveil and hopefully Microsoft will keep the process open to some rich community input.