Analyst: Wall Street likes Microsoft's SOA message
Wall Street may call the shots for which technologies run Main Street, but who runs Wall Street's own technologies? Wall Street firms have been the crown jewel customers of IBM and Sun Microsystems, but at least one analyst said Microsoft is also becoming a force to be reckoned with. As Darryl Taft informs us in a new eWeek article, Michael DeSanti, a partner with Eikos Partners, said that Microsoft's .NET Framework 3.0 meets the needs of financial services firms trying to build extensible SOAs. The .Net Framework 3.0 includes WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), Windows WF (Workflow Foundation) and CardSpace.
Wall Street firms mainly use IBM and Sun Microsystems, but Microsoft's SOA offering is appealingSpeaking at the recent SOA on Wall Street conference in New York, DeSantis pointed out that "Microsoft has a solid set of offerings in the SOA space. Microsoft has been integrating SOA technology into all of its enterprise offerings from its operating system to Microsoft Office 2007 and various elements of the Microsoft enterprise application development environment," he added.
DeSanti lauds Microsoft's earlier SOA work, which gives it a strong history in this space. "They've been there since the beginning with DCOM [Distributed Component Object Model] and CORBA [Common Object Request Broker Architecture] support." Microsoft was instrumental in the development of XML and XML Schema, the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and the building out of the WS-* Web services stack and the WSDL (Web Services Description Language), DeSanti added.
DeSanti also had high praise for Microsoft's WCF, which provides "one framework" for all of a developer's Web services integration needs:
"WCF provides support for security, reliable messaging, transactions, metadata and XML, all under a common programming framework," he said, describing WPF as a framework providing a productive, unified approach to creating user interfaces, media and documents to deliver an unmatched user experience. "Most people like WPF for creating next-generation user interfaces in this framework. You can deliver interactive user interfaces and facilitate developer-designer productivity."