My fifth day here in Redmond starts with Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference first day. I arrived a little earlier before conference starts, so I could enjoy scenery in Washington State. I went to Mount Rainer, Mount St. Helens, Seattle Needle, Pike Market, and Snoqualmie Falls and so on. This is definitely the ever green state. Rainer and St. Helens are room name in the Microsoft Conference Center, where event is held.
First session of the day is by Robert Wahbe, Donald Ferguson and Steven Martin about Microsoft‘s Vision for the next generation application platform. This is a keynote session, which lasted two hours. First speaker was Donald Ferguson and he went straight into why he started working for Microsoft now instead of IBM and is inspired by Microsoft’s vision. Microsoft is ideal for Model driven development, internet service bus. These two subjects are his passion. Then he went into a scenario about travelling and how his passions fit in.
Next person is Robert Wahbe and he made it clear that this conference is sold out (1000 persons), which is a couple more than last year (around 800 persons). He thanked attendees, sponsors, and etcetera. He went into crossing boundaries and how his keynote will evolve with Microsoft’s vision and coming products.
Approach is services, more investment of Microsoft into it. So Client, Server, Cloud (Software plus services) and model driven (requirements, design, process, contracts) together with challenges like communication, relationships, end to end view, skill set and ecosystem. Vision of Microsoft here is to bring models and services together to gain productivity, TCO and agility by 10 times.
Roadmap from now to 2008: BizTalk Server R2, .net framework 3.5, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008.
Then Robert let Steven Martin talk about the current wave of technology around productivity, TCO and agility. He went into focusing on people, process and tools with a scenario Achmea (Dutch insurance company) using Visual Studio team system. Service bus technology was mentioned next with .NET framework, BizTalk Server, AmberPoint (governance) and SOA software. Another case study MedicAlert around Enterprise Service Bus was brought up. He finally went into people ready process and business process alliance. Later two partners (Accenture and Avanade) of business process alliance were brought on stage. They did a demo with ARIS and went through business process of hiring people.
Get started today go to www.microsoft.com/soa. You will find here SOA and Business Process Pack together with prescriptive guidance.
Where is technology is heading done by Don Wahbe. He went into OSLO project and new wave application like BizTalk Server 6, Visual Studio 10, and System Center 5. More can be found in an article found in Infoworld by Paul Krill. Justin Smith a technology evangelist did a demo around OSLO. He also pointed out difference between Internet Service Bus crossing boundaries between organizations and applications versus Enterprise Service Bus crossing application boundaries inside an organization. Demo and so on can be done through BizTalk labs. Next another quick demo ‘universal editor’ for models done.
Oslo in nutshell
Huge bet and double down (blackjack term) on services!!!!
Closing
These are some blurts from the keynote today here at Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2007. So hopefully you get a little impression of Microsoft’s vision for next couple of years.
Technorati: 
Microsoft SOA and BPM Conference 2007 
Microsoft OSLO project 
BizTalk 2006 R2 
Evergreen State 
Redmond 
Mount Rainer
