Intelligent Enterprise reports on an event in Redmond Washington where Microsoft announced its strategy for ESB. The strategy centers around the "Indigo" Windows Communication Foundation software, which is a Web Services framework built in to the operating system. Other key components cited included the Microsoft BizTalk Server.
This combination of a lightweight Web Services centric core with an integration focused services platform are not being touted as a pure-play ESB, but rather as a set of packaging recommenations that will allow Independent Software Vendors to build ESBs quickly.
The full article is available here.
This move by the software giant comes on the heels of the wave of open source ESB projects and SOA strategy announcements these past few weeks. While Microsoft fell short of announcing that it had built an ESB, the combination of integration and web services technologies seemed to be part of an overall positioning taken by the software giant. The next version of Biztalk 2006 (Release 2) is scheduled to ship in the 3rd quarter and will feature RFID and EDI capabilities.