Where does 'Dublin' leave BizTalk Server?

Last Friday, I caught up with Microsoft's Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the company's Connected Systems Division, and asked him a question that had been burning in my mind ever since he briefed me on Microsoft's "Dublin" application server technology: Where does Dublin leave BizTalk Server?

Dublin is an add-on that extends Windows Server's Application Server Role with infrastructure code to handle composite applications that have workflow oriented processes. Put simply, it executes XAML-based applications. That is significant because Microsoft's upcoming "Oslo" wave of development products serialize "M" application models into XAML. That made me question why customers would be to install BizTalk.

Dublin is complementary to BizTalk; it targets different workloads, Kawasaki said. "Integration [which BizTalk provides] is a separate [need] from customers that want to build customer applications and have an application server to run it in." Dublin and BizTalk will remain separately packaged offerings, he added. "They will be used together in many cases."

For example, BizTalk will be required when an application needs to connect to a mainframe, or conversely, when an ESB needs to connect to a back end, yet needs custom application logic, he said. Kawasaki acknowledged that Microsoft needs to provide more customer guidance.

"BizTalk will continue to be a key component in the Dublin/Oslo world. However, just how it will fit in is still a bit murky. I expect more announcements on this front in the near future," Forrester principal analyst Ken Vollmer wrote in an e-mail.

Microsoft: 'Open source is a source of innovation'

Microsoft appreciates open source as a source of innovation, and will expand its involvement with the open source community, Robert Duffner, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, said over coffee Monday morning.

During our discussion, he also opined that open source is not Linux, nor should Linux be the poster child of open source. You may want to sit down before you read on.

All sources of innovation are significant to Microsoft - regardless of the methodology that was used, Duffner said. No less than chief software architect Ray Ozzie appreciates open source and envisioned a broader role for it at Microsoft when he hired Sam Ramji (directory of Microsoft's open source software lab), he noted.

update: Microsoft informs me that Duffner misspoke about Ozzie's role in Ramji's hiring. I am told that Ray Ozzie didn’t actually hire Sam (it was Bill Hilf that hired Sam to run the open source lab, but Sam was actually already at Microsoft before that.)

Indeed, Ozzie has served as an internal proponent. It was Ozzie who insisted that Windows Azure, Microsoft's development platform for the cloud, be open to Eclipse tooling and PHP programmers, Duffner said. But the company is admittedly more pragmatic than altruistic.

Microsoft has a market driven approach Duffner said. Duffner, an IBM alumnus, explained that the company's involvement in open source projects is driven by product groups, and is in that regard no different from IBM. However, he conceded that there has been more altruism out of IBM to date.

IBM's early involvement with the Apache Geronimo project was done out of self interest to help it flesh out its Java EE 5 strategy, he said. "Customers demanded [Java EE 5]," and IBM needed another year to complete an update to WebSphere, he claimed. Similarly, customers in the financial industry prompted Microsoft join the AMQP project, he said.

When asked what projects Microsoft is contributing to, he rattled off a list including Apache HBase, Apache, Apache Qpid, AMQP, and PHP. However, Microsoft has not yet contributed code to AMQP, and Microsoft's involvement in HBase happened through an acquisition. Regardless, the fact that its work with HBase has persisted is a, "big deal," he said. Microsoft also funds the Apache Foundation.

Microsoft's PHP work has a lot to do with SQL Server. The company is working to create a database abstraction layer for PHP so that developers will not be beholden to Sun's MySQL, he said. Not surprisingly, Duffner noted that Microsoft is intent on tying PHP to SQL Server to offer developers, "more choices for development and deployment."

The open source technology center team at Microsoft has around 15 dedicated employees, not including contractors or product teams that engage in interoperability work. The team holds internal events to promote the use of open source at Microsoft, and is acting as, "change agents within Microsoft," according to Duffner.

While it is not working with every group at Microsoft yet, the team does work closely with Microsoft Research and the CodePlex open source project hosting team, he said. In our discussion, he expressed a strong desire to collaborate with the SharePoint product team. The takeaway was that the scope of open source is not limited to operating systems.

As a matter of fact, the company would very badly like to shake the perception that open source is commercial Linux versus Windows. "[Linux] never had head to head competition against Windows anyway," he said. "It's UNIX VS Linux and Windows." However, he acknowledged that Linux will become more of a competitor if UNIX market share continue to slip.

While I do share his belief that there is much more to open source than Linux, accepting that Microsoft is not concerned about Linux requires the willful suspension of disbelief. One of the open source team's most recent releases is the new Web installer for Microsoft's Web services stack - Microsoft's answer to the LAMP stack.

In case you were wondering, the 'L' in LAMP stands for Linux. And Microsoft recognizes why LAMP is attractive to Web developers. LAMP has an attractive, pluggable architecture, Duffner said.

Microsoft prepares for search battle

Do not rule out the possibility that Microsoft will snatch up Yahoo. The latest rumor is that Ballmer and Co. are willing to shell out US$20 billion to acquire it. I won't speak to the veracity of those reports, but Microsoft needs to get its search act in gear. Buying market share is absolutely necessary.

Steve Ballmer may have recently put the kibosh on the possibility of a transaction with Yahoo, but Microsoft's need for more market share stands. It needs to gain market share if it is even going to claw its way up to fight tackle Google.

Steve is also renowned for his single-minded determinism. It is likely that there will at the very least be a search deal between the two companies. Something is happening. My friend Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft is gearing up for a major re-branding of its search properties. Windows Live may become known as "Kumo," which is a Japanese word for spider.

Yahoo is a stronger brand than Kumo. That would provide Microsoft with higher ground to take on Google. Whether it is able to charge the hill or gets bogged down is another story altogether.

That said, integrating all of Yahoo into Microsoft does not make sense. It would be a painful process as cultures class, and talented engineers will leave both companies. Microsoft will have to pay to keep that talent on board - beyond what it would be paying for the company itself.

A glimpse at Silverlight 3

Microsoft's blogger extraordinaire Scott Guthrie posted a missive about Silverlight 3 to his blog on Monday. But you could miss it if you blink.

Microsoft will ship Silverlight 3 next year, he wrote. Microsoft will deliver media enhancements such as H.264 video support and 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration. It is worth noting that Adobe added 3D capabilities to Flash player 10, which is already available. Expect Adobe and Microsoft to be playing a game of leap frog for the indefinite future.

Silverlight 3 will also deliver application development improvements including:

-richer data-binding support
-additional controls
-an editable and interactive designer for Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express

"Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements - we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer. ;-)," he wrote.

Now it's up to us to dig up the rest of the story. ;-)

SharePoint is good for Microsoft's partners

In my conversations with component makers there is optimism that Microsoft will permit its partners to fill the gaps left where its platform ends and customer use cases begin. Many of those companies believe that developers will be as receptive to buying Web parts as they are to buying .NET controls today.

Of course, the opposite might happen - SharePoint has become big business for Microsoft (a billion dollar product). The company is facing increased competition, and may cycle more of its resources to SharePoint in response.

That would take the wind out of its partners' sails. Amid an uncertain economic outlook and rumors of upcoming consolidation in the component market, the prospect of coming to pass could leave some of its partners jittery, and it has.

I'm led to believe that Microsoft will do what it has always done, build a platform and its partners will live in the ecosystem that forms around it. Visual Studio 2010 is evidence of the direction Redmond is going: VS 2010 has new tooling to make it easier for developers to debug, debug and design SharePoint sites.

Microsoft may seed SharePoint with some Web parts just as it has bundled rudimentary controls with Silverlight 2, but there is nothing to indicate that it intends to intrude upon its partners' domain. In fact, the opposite may be true. If more customers are building SharePoint sites, there will be more demand for specialized Web parts, and consequently more opportunity for its partners.

Microsoft should make its intentions known and nurture the growth of the SharePoint ecosystem just as it has done for Visual Studio, COM and .NET.

The proof is in the pudding

Two years have passed since Microsoft and Novell struck their technical collaboration agreement, and Novell received a windfall of US$348 million in cold hard cash. As my father used to say, "The proof is in the pudding."

Here's the proof: the companies are nearly ready to deliver some software. In the first half of next year, Microsoft will release a management pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise that integrates with its System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 software. Likewise, Novell is completing a beta of Mono Moonlight, a variation of Microsoft's Silverlight run time that works with Linux.

Microsoft demonstrated a technical preview of the management pack at the TechEd EMEA conference earlier this month, my former colleague and Microsoft’s senior open source community manager Peter Galli, wrote in a post on the company's Port 25 blog. It manages Linux and Windows servers from a single console.

Further, Microsoft has been very collaborative with the Mono team. Its engineers are in regular communication with Novell, and has provided test cases to assist with Moonlight's development, Mono project head Miguel de Icaza told me in a recent interview. Significant work has happened.

A handful of other Linux vendors have struck similar interoperability agreements with Microsoft, and there is no doubt more to come. Interoperability is good for customers regardless of what motivates Microsoft, whether it be its enterprise customers' demands for interoperability or the European Commission. Even a cynic would have to acknowledge that the company has thus far stayed true to its interoperability principles.

Yahoo's Yang out as CEO

If I held stock in Yahoo, today would be a bittersweet day for me. Jerry Yang, one of the culprits responsible for decimating shareholder wealth by not accepting Microsoft's offer(s), is out as CEO. The search has already begun for his replacement.

Today, Yahoo's share price lingers somewhere around US$10.00; Microsoft offered to pay $33.00 per share. It is a shame that Carl Icahn didn't join Yahoo's board sooner than August - before Microsoft had taken its proposal off the table.

Chairman of the board Roy Bostock is charged with recruiting a new CEO. My advice for Roy: find a replacement for yourself and others on the board who failed your shareholders. Step aside and allow Yahoo's 'new strategic direction' to take hold under new management.