But Microsoft has big plans to change that. It has already entered the enterprise service bus market, has designs on governance, and is partnering with management vendors. Most ambitiously, it has announced technologies that could put it at the center of business-to-business Web services while making application development accessible to everyone--if the products ever ship, that is.

WAITING FOR THE BUS

According to the Redmond party line, Microsoft has always supported SOA. It has simply seen SOA as a foundation for business process management rather than an end in itself. This is partly true: Microsoft was an early supporter of SOAP and the many WS-* (Web Services) standards built on top of it.

Most agree that SOA is an architectural style, not a specific product. Microsoft goes further, even denying that the ESB is a product. Now, many vendors sell standalone enterprise service buses, and ESBs are widely considered to be at the core of SOA, but Microsoft isn't necessarily wrong. Rather, it has chosen to spread ESB functionality across several products, many without obvious counterparts in the non-Microsoft world.

In fact, for a long time, Microsoft eschewed the phrase "enterprise service bus" altogether, saying its products offered a superset of ESB functionality. It relented this year and now promotes iBizTalk Server 2006 R2--still mainly a BPM server--as a way to implement an ESB. This doesn't mean BizTalk is an ESB; users wanting full ESB functionality also will need the Microsoft Visual Studio .Net development environment, the Office InfoPath XML forms editor, and SQL Server.