Real World SOA “At the Edge”

Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications

Enterprises that develop services for their internal applications are increasingly looking for ways to expose these same services to their customers via the Web, as a way of engaging users more interactively and building closer, more sustained customer relationships. However, customers are also ever more sophisticated, looking for rich user experiences that mix real-time media and interactivity.

At the Mix 2007 conference in Las Vegas, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie announced an exciting new platform for web development called Silverlight. Silverlight enables a new generation of web applications that are known as Rich Internet Apps. By bringing .NET programming support into a cross-platform, multi-browser environment, Silverlight enables a new generation of service oriented applications to be created which can reach anybody on the planet who has access to the Internet.

Based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Silverlight enables developers and designers to easily use existing skills and tools to deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications. Simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets means Silverlight works with any back-end Web environment or technology - no “rip and replace” required. Silverlight integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.

Developers can readily use the same tools (Visual Studio) and programming model (.NET Framework) that they are using to build their internal SOA infrastructure to also now develop rich Web 2.0 style applications. They can also take advantage of dramatically improved performance for AJAX-enabled Web sites with the power, performance, and flexibility of Silverlight and Microsoft .NET –connected software.

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RFID and Mobility

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has already started to change the retail and manufacturing industries with its ability to track goods in real-time from the factory floor to retail shelves. However, as usage begins to move into more mainstream adoption, customers are increasingly struggling with the effort of on-going management of hardware devices, increased velocity of new real-time events, integration with existing process and applications, and overall total cost of the solution.

Microsoft believes SOA provides a solution for helping customers sift thru the massive amounts of data from RFID tags and sensors in order to turn it into business intelligence and, hopefully, better decisions. This is accomplished by using platform technologies like BizTalk RFID to easily connect intelligent devices at the edge (which can be simply viewed and connected as web services) to real-time business processes in the back-office (such as ERP or supply-chain systems). By enabling a new generation of rich analytics applications that can monitor real-time services from the plant-floor or retail outlet, this provides greater end-to-end visibility and control of your mission-critical business processes.

Another key innovation is around taking RFID technology to the mobile device. Microsoft and Intel have partnered closely around the development of the Intel R1000 chipset, which pre-integrates all of the necessary components for an RFID reader into an 8-millimeter by 8-millimeter chip. This addresses the problems faced by today’s first generation readers, which are too expensive, too complex, and have too much variability from manufacturer to manufacturer, and creates a form factor that can be readily deployed on mobile or hand-held devices.

In upcoming releases, Microsoft’s RFID platform will also run on Windows CE embedded devices and interface in a seamless manner with the Intel RFID Transceiver Interface providing an integrated platform for intelligent edge applications with enterprise-ready support for device discovery, provisioning, security, patch management and monitoring, and troubleshooting. This “edge” device platform will provide an end-to-end SOA-based software platform for RFID and sensors – from data source to back-end system integration – reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and increasing the ROI of vertical RFID solutions.

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Enabling Software + Services

Microsoft’s vision is to empower customer to make smart decisions on when to implement software on-premise and when to implement services in the cloud. Customers consistently tell us that the one size fits all approach is costly. They want flexibility in software and services. More importantly, we want to protect customers from the Tyranny of “Or”. There are organizations today that are purely services focused. We think they are half right. It’s the coupling of software and services that is really powerful. Corporate strategy, regulations, etc will always make it desirable for organizations to maintain data / process within their firewall. Our goal is to make services + software seamless. While “Or” sounds like a choice, we see it as more of an ultimatum. Customers want and deserve real choice here, and they want to be able to change their mind as their needs change without reinventing their architecture.

Microsoft demonstrated our commitment to the Software + Services vision with the CTP release of BizTalk Services. BizTalk Services is the first in a wave of enterprise class services that Microsoft will release. These services, which have been in internal incubation for the past year, represent hosted versions of some technologies developed in the Connected Systems Division. At its core, BizTalk Services is an Internet Service Bus (ISB) which combines a set of platform services including identity, message relay, and eventing, into a cohesive whole, to address these needs.

While an ISB has some of the characteristics you might see in a traditional Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), the scope is very different. Today’s ESB provides connectivity that is designed for use inside the corporate firewall. The next generation of applications must span networks, securely integrating services located inside the firewall, with services hosted at partner networks, or even on the public internet. Beyond connectivity, developers need integrated workflow, identity and access management and the ability to easily move data between these end points, regardless of the location of the firewall. BizTalk Services ISB provides these capabilities, in complement to existing BizTalk Server and .NET Framework use on-premise, to answer the needs of both Web 2.0 and enterprises around building federated, composite applications.