Time is now for web services, says Microsoft

NEWS Microsoft laid out its future vision of how web services will transform the way businesses use IT at its tenth annual TechEd developer conference in Barcelona today. Developers will be able to use XML to build smarter software applications that manage themselves and communicate with other applications without posing integration problems, according to Microsoft. In the main keynote speech Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate VP of platform strategy at Microsoft, said the dilemma businesses now face is not whether to deploy web services but how. "We bet our company on the XML set of technologies and this is a precursor to the next generation enterprise architecture. I recommend that customers get started by integrating two or three or four back-end systems," he said. Commenting on Microsoft's recent decision to restrict the use of the .Net branding to genuine web services products, Parthasarathy admitted overuse had led to confusion among customers. "There was a point in time where .Net meant everything and it meant nothing," he said. Built in integration and management features in next generation applications will also make application servers by the likes of BEA and IBM redundant, he claimed. "Web services provides a solution to the integration pain point. The business application of the future is going to consider integration as a basic function." Microsoft is the latest vendor to reinforce its own vision of web services as the main protagonists jostle over standards, and the company is using the TechEd conference to showcase forthcoming releases including its Office System suite and BizTalk Server 2004 ebusiness software. But Parthasarathy said the next major release for Microsoft will be the new Windows platform, codenamed Longhorn, which is due in 2005. "This is probably the biggest bet the company has made since Windows 95. With the Windows Longhorn client you will get Office for Longhorn, MSN for Longhorn, you will get a companion Longhorn server release. Every one of our products in Microsoft will line up with the Longhorn wave."