The Microsoft Certified Architect Program – Architects Certifying Architects

Be a practicing architect who is able to perform in current IT environments.

Be able to communicate up (to business owners), down (to technologists), and across (to other architects).

Provide predictability to IT and repeatable success to IT projects by using frameworks, methodologies, patterns, and best practices.

Take a vendor-neutral approach to architecture.

Solutions architects: Solutions architects communicate primarily with business owners within a company and with the technical staff that delivers the solution. The projects they work on affect the enterprise. They design the solution to take advantage of the existing assets, and then integrate them into the existing environment adhering to the enterprise architecture and solving the business problems of the business owner or unit.

Infrastructure architects: Infrastructure architects communicate primarily with operations managers who are responsible for maintaining the IT environment and end users and with the engineers that maintain specific areas of the infrastructure. They typically report through the IT group and are responsible for creating an architecture that meets the business and service level agreement requirements of the business owners and supports the applications and solutions that are required to operate their day-to-day businesses.

Product or Depth architects: Product or Depth architects communicate primarily with the solutions or infrastructure architects, IT and application decision makers, and the technologists. As soon as product decisions for architecture have been made, the product architect, with a deep level of experience and knowledge of the products being used, comes in to help develop the more specific product architecture.