Everyone has been asking about Microsoft SOA. So what is it?

Officially, you can refer to www.microsoft.com/soa. This is a new customer-facing mini solution center that has been launched. Don't be surprised if you find SOA parked under Microsoft BizTalk Server!  This site helps showcase available customer-ready materials, provides education on our vision for the SOA space, and provides an opportunity to learn about partner solutions.

There is a customer-ready overview paper that provides the top-level “Real World SOA” story of how Microsoft’s advances the next era in business agility through our vision for pragmatic service orientation. 

White Paper: A Real-World Approach to SOA

This white paper explores the business rationale for Service Oriented Architecture, as well as the Microsoft “real world” approach to SOA.

For Customer Evidence - Video case studies on both Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Siemens AG are available which highlights how they advanced their businesses through Microsoft SOA technologies.  You can also find more vertical industry case study materials selected from the manufacturing, retail, financial services, and healthcare industries.

Many a times, most organisations are too focused on SOA and they tend to neglect the importance of building a robust infrastructure that allows them to scale their applications as well as support the ever changing business landscape and applications. Microsoft recognise the industry trend of higher adoption of SOA and hence put together some thought leadership in terms of Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa973773.aspx. You can find reference architectures in here.

On a personal note, I view SOA as a design approach and the recommended architecture for the current paradigm. It is an architecture approach that will take off finally after so much buzz these few years. However, there are not many people who truly understands the gist of SOA and how you can adapt to your existing environment. Ultimately, for a successful implementation, there needs to be business users involvement. An IT project cannot succeed without the endorsement and involvement of the users of the end product/application! SOA will be the discipline where everything starts from business. It would be interesting to see the true adoption of SOA and its success rates in Singapore!