As the release of .Net 3.5 nears, Microsoft has intensified its marketing efforts on SOA with the launch of a new SOA web site on MSDN2, a series of comprehensive webinars on Microsoft’s SOA Application Platform, and the publication of an ebook, “SOA in the Real World” authored by John Evdemon (co-chair of the WS-BPEL TC at OASIS). There is also this new conference which will be hosted in Redmond at the end of October, “SOA & Business Process Conference 2007”. Microsoft also sponsored a comprehensive Application Platform study targeted at 500 enterprises (1000 or more employees) based in North America.
InfoQ talked to Dino Chiesa, Director of Marketing for .Net in the Connected System Division at Microsoft to better understand what's coming in .Net 3.5 for SOA, Microsoft’s SOA strategy and how customers are using WCF:
SOA is hot in the industry and the adoption of WCF is terrific, the results from the IDC report show that .Net is the most popular infrastructure for SOA among enterprises. The key to our success it to help our customers get concrete things done with a pragmatic approach. Generally, our customers avoid the big ticket, top-down SOA initiatives. They are looking for a stepwise approach. They want to see the benefits before they go to the next step. We think customers can apply our technologies, the principles of agile development to architecture problems, take a more real world approach, and see if the result generalizes. As a result, a lot of them have already had successful SOA initiatives and they are now targeting increased levels of maturity.
Read the full interview here.