"With our continued contributions to important industry standards, the
successful launches of Visual Studio® .NET and the .NET Framework, and the
tremendous progress we have made toward adding XML Web services capabilities
across the entire family of .NET Enterprise Servers, Microsoft continues to
demonstrate its leadership and vision in this new, exciting area of
computing," Flessner said. "In the relatively short time that businesses
have been building and running XML Web services, it is clear that the
benefits of this technology are numerous and bountiful, but there is still
tremendous opportunity to innovate and continue to improve the experience
and value for our customers. Indeed, this is the sort of challenge that
keeps us motivated."
Pillars of Transformation for the Next-Generation XML Web Services Platform
Also joining Flessner onstage was Pat Helland, senior architect in the .NET
Enterprise Server division at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft in 1994,
Helland held architect positions at Tandem Computers and HaL Computers. In
the keynote address, Flessner and Helland discussed how the evolution of
standards for XML Web services will dramatically expand the ability of
businesses and people to benefit from technology, potentially resulting in
accelerated worldwide economic growth. However, Flessner emphasized that
innovation around standards alone will not drive this expansion; Microsoft
and the industry at large must make significant investments in innovation in
the computing platforms that take advantage of these standards, going well
beyond the current state of the industry.
Application Models: From Interconnected Monoliths to Autonomous Computing
Today, many companies are achieving significant business benefits by using
XML Web services to integrate their internal systems and to connect those
systems with their partners' and customers' systems. To achieve these
benefits, existing technology investments are "wrapped" with a layer of XML
Web services. As demonstrated by the recent shipments of Visual Studio .NET,
the .NET Framework, BizTalk® Server 2002, Commerce Server 2002, and XML Web
services toolkits for Office XP, SQL Server (TM) 2000 and Exchange 2000
Server, Microsoft leads the industry in shipping new software designed to
help customers utilize this strategy.
Although the strategy of wrapping existing systems delivers immediate and
tangible benefits, in the future, businesses will be able to achieve even
greater benefits by decomposing monolithic applications into smaller,
autonomous XML Web services. With this new architectural approach, and with
related standards and platform advancements, customers will be able to
achieve even deeper and more flexible digital relationships through XML Web
services than they are able to achieve today. This new approach also will
make it easier to achieve the highest levels of scalability, availability
and reliability.
Data: Unification Through XML
Today, businesses often store critical data in a variety of formats and
locations that are difficult to bring together. Structured data, such as
inventory information, is most often stored in databases. Unstructured data,
such as documents and messages, may be stored in the file system, in e-mail
and collaboration servers, in media servers, and many other places. The
current generation of tools and technology, on which businesses rely to make
critical decisions, lacks the capability to accurately find data wherever it
may be located and to easily integrate structured and unstructured data.
Microsoft has made significant advancements toward the goal of unifying data
by allowing for the storage and/or representation of both structured and
unstructured data in XML format. Furthermore, Microsoft has begun to unify
the programming model across the variety of data storage mechanisms by
delivering support for XML Web services-based access, for example, with SQL
Server 2000 and Exchange 2000 Server.
In the future, Microsoft will extend storage mechanisms through the use of
rich, XML-based schema, which will make it easier for end users to find any
type of data stored in any location. Microsoft also will continue to unify
the programming model across all possible data stores through the use of XML
Web services. Finally, through additional platform innovations, Microsoft
will make it possible for end users to use their applications and access
their data regardless of whether or not they are connected to a network or
the Internet.
Trustworthy Computing: Secure, Available, Private
In the same way that businesses and individuals depend on the reliable
delivery of basic utilities such as water, electricity and
telecommunications to be successful, the aim of Trustworthy Computing is to
make technology equally reliable and trusted.. The overall goal of
Trustworthy Computing is to make technology safe, private and available by
building software and services that are inherently more secure, and to
empower customers to make clear and informed choices about their security
and privacy. The key, interrelated pillars of Trustworthy Computing are
security, availability and privacy.
To achieve these goals, Microsoft is working to create a tight feedback loop
between customers, support, development and industry partners. This feedback
will enable Microsoft to identify and resolve issues more swiftly and to
proactively alert customers to the availability of software updates.
Microsoft also is making progress in delivering software that is designed to
be self-managing and self-tuning, and that is securely locked down by
default -- resulting in dramatic decreases in the cost of managing
solutions.
In the future, through continued investment in industry standards and
through innovation around secure, available and manageable systems, Microsoft and the industry will be able to achieve the goals for Trustworthy Computing. In addition to advancements in the way that software is designed and tested, the combination of commodity hardware and networking, new XML Web services standards, new operating platform advancements, and data storage innovation supporting massive redundancy, will deliver inherently resilient systems. Furthermore, evolving the unit of manageability from clients, server hardware and applications to XML Web services will simplify the effort required to keep systems running and secure.
Along these lines, Microsoft today jointly announced with IBM and VeriSign
the publication of a new XML Web services security specification, WS-Security. WS-Security is the foundation for a comprehensive, flexible security model for Web services. In addition, Microsoft and IBM jointly published a broader road map, including an additional set of proposed XML Web services capabilities, designed to tackle the growing need for the consistent support of more secure XML Web services. The proposed road map outlines additional XML Web services security specifications that Microsoft and IBM plan to develop along with key customers, industry partners and standards organizations.
