Microsoft wraps its response to IBM's 'on-demand' strategy around Office

There's still a big chance for Microsoft to make serious inroads in the Web services field for businesses. But in a field where, all things being equal, Web services tend to look pretty much equal to one another, the company is banking on Office to help it distinguish its products.

Every big or even medium-sized move Microsoft has made in the business field has been leveraged, not financially the way companies that don't have a wealth of resources tend to do, but strategically, as an extension of some pre-existing real or perceived strength. Two of those strengths today are Office, which has near-ubiquitous status on the world's business desktops, and the .NET Framework, which Microsoft now believes has a bigger place in the world's IT shops than Sun's Java.

Today, Microsoft extended itself just a bit further by leveraging itself against both of those strengths, and the direction of that extension is into IBM territory. IBM's strengths are, among other places, in middleware and Web services; and last month, that company made a play for vertical markets by unveiling what it called a suite of "business optimization" tools geared towards no fewer than 16 different, discrete industries. Its goal was to give businesses including banking, restaurants, health care providers, and law enforcement good reasons to tie their unique business logic directly to its WebSphere platform.

Microsoft's response is a play for a handful of some of those same businesses, and it wants them to tie their business logic and applications to the .NET Framework. But its route once again runs through familiar territory: the comfortable and reliable realm of Office, and the reliable notion that businesses in charge of their own numbers are more likely than not to be using Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

Last month, Microsoft software architect Mike Walker announced the pending release of a set of more than 90 interoperable components for financial applications, gathered together around the umbrella concept of Office Business Applications (OBA). Those components were finally assembled last week, and Microsoft announced their general availability this morning.

"These components are built as composite OBA components," Walker wrote last month following an initial public demonstration at an Office Developers' Conference. "This makes these components composable in a mash-ups fashion. Since the components are driven by industry scenarios they address discrete areas of functionality in financial services business processes."

Today, the first four reference architectures were made available for businesses that want to make -- or try to make -- "mash-ups" of quilted component logic that rely on .NET, Excel, Silverlight, Windows Live, or any combination. The goal is to let businesses use whatever they happen to have on hand to help front their business logic, so long as the foundation of that logic is relatively sound. That foundation is established by these reference architectures, the first four of which are life insurance, broker commissions, loan origination, and online banking.

For instance, the life insurance architecture features, among other things, a set of message exchange patterns (MEP) that Web services require when exchanging data with other applications that pertain to the insurance industry. Consider them "sockets" of a sort that link the data from standard industry forms to one another. Other components enable developers to build workflows around these exchanges -- auditable tasks in Microsoft architecture -- and display the contents of messages in forms built with Silverlight, to appear in Web browsers or stand-alone applications.

As you can see, Office doesn't really play a central role here, except perhaps with regard to the inclusion of SharePoint services for exchanging messaging over the Web in a secure fashion, and also InfoPath forms for the creation of data used in these MEPs. But Office can play a role depending on the developer's strategy, which goes back to Walker's invocation of the "mash-up" metaphor.

It's an image IBM might prefer to avoid, preferring instead the clean and direct image of a well-oiled business machine. But Walker likes mash-ups because he feels they are the natural products of...wait for it...interoperability between applications. These mash-ups, he wrote, "break down the classic interoperability barriers. OBAs show customers new integration patterns and new uses of LOB [line-of-business] information."

For a corporate statement this morning, Walker wrote, "The OBA Component Library gives firms a head start toward developing solutions by providing real-world scenarios that illustrate how new business applications can be built, and existing systems improved, using Microsoft Office technologies to overcome common challenges." Well, yes, to a certain extent. But there are other features that come into play as well, most notably Silverlight, which in another sense holds the promise of enabling line-of-business applications using Web services in a way that bypasses traditional middleware, going straight to the source of business logic.

Of course, that could bypass Office altogether. But then, advertising that as a feature wouldn't make for a good marketing strategy, would it?