Q&A: Burley Kawasaki -- Redmondmag.com

Q&A: Burley Kawasaki

By Ed Scannell
12/01/2007

Burley Kawasaki, director of Microsoft's connected systems division, sat down with Redmond Editor Ed Scannell to discuss "Oslo" (see "Microsoft Unveils Vision and Roadmap") and its impact on other core Microsoft initiatives such as Software plus Services (S+S).

Redmond: What is Oslo and what are the long-term strategic goals behind it?
Kawasaki: It's the code name for technical investments we're making that will be delivered across products within our Application Platform, including Visual Studio System Center, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Services and the .NET Framework. We're making this investment in order to address some bigger issues.

To frame this: It has to do with the clock speed of business increasing and IT being constrained by a number of long-lasting boundaries that prevent them from keeping up with business. There are boundaries between IT and the business because they don't speak the same language or they just work differently. There are also boundaries across technologies. We still have the alphabet soup of protocols and standards, so how do we connect the different platforms that our applications are built on top of?

Read an extended version of Ed's interview with Burley Kawasaki here.

How does Oslo further evolve your existing service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategies?
There are two key investment areas with Oslo.

First, we continue to deeply invest in our SOA platform. So with things like BizTalk Server and BizTalk Services, we made those the anchor for our SOA investments in order to make it easier to write services and deploy them -- not only across a heterogeneous enterprise, but also stretching to the cloud, which is what BizTalk Services is targeting.

So by deepening investments in both BizTalk Server and Services, Oslo expands the capabilities of our SOA platform.

And the second big bet?
The second big bet for Oslo is around model-driven development.

This will be the anchor for a new generation of application development. It will take model-driven development techniques mainstream and really deliver a faster clock speed to IT that it needs in order to keep up with the pace of business.

About the Author

Ed Scannell is the editor of Redmond magazine.

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