Microsoft Participating in the Object Management Group (OMG)

This week I had the privilege of sitting with Bob Muglia while he taped a short video on his thoughts of how model-driven development could transform the way we develop and manage applications. Bob also announced Microsoft’s participation in the Object Management Group (OMG) standards organization, which owns key modeling standards like UML and BPMN. Given bob’s history, it was great to hear his perspective on how modeling will impact the next generation of computing.

 

Bob spoke about the opportunity that Microsoft sees to take this kind of approach mainstream – not just the Fortune 50 or Fortune 500, but the Fortune 5 million… In the video, Bob talks about modeling as a core focus of Microsoft’s Dynamic IT strategy, and highlighted three areas of focus for Microsoft: platform, personas and partners.

 

What is the significance of these 3 “Ps” aside from being a super-cool alliteration? Well, they are the three-part strategy to bringing modeling into the mainstream. We think that by driving modeling capabilities into the core .NET platform, expanding the various types of personas within an organization that can interact with models, and finally expanding the partner ecosystem to create a broad array of solutions and standards, this gives customers – of all sizes – the ability to benefit from modeling as a part of their application development. In many cases, customers will benefit from modeling through natural evolution of existing technologies. They won’t necessarily know they are using modeling when they deploy an app – their life will just get easier.

 

I’ve talked about “ Oslo” many times here. “Oslo” is the codename for a set of technical investments that will significantly enhance modeling capabilities for Microsoft, our partner ecosystem and our customers. It consists of:

· A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner

· A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models

· A repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components

It’s also important to note that modeling is a company-wide investment, which means it doesn’t start or stop with “Oslo” – it includes a lot of exciting work we’re doing as part of Visual Studio Team System “Rosario”, System Center, BizTalk Server, SQL Server and more.

 

Want to know more about the OMG news or what Bob had to say? Check out the video.