Yesterday, Dan and I heard a talk from John deVadoss, Director Architecture Strategy at Microsoft. He delivered the Wednesday Software Architecture Summit keynote titled SA Summit Keynote: Software Architecture on the Edge: Moving Beyond SOA.

John presented the fundamentals of SOA and of Web 2.0 as the basic architectural styles of the enterprise and the consumer space, respectively. He called both of these “edge” architectures. The purpose of his talk was to show some nascent work from Microsoft on how to connect these two different architectural styles.

One of the points he made is that SOA has tended to shift away from the user-centric approaches of previous rounds of enterprise architectures. Of course, Web 2.0 has shifted more towards user-centric approaches than even previous Web architectural styles. Fundamentally, he argues, moving away from the user is a bad thing and the ideas of Web 2.0 can be used to bring SOA back to the users. I certainly agree with him on this point.

So, how do these two come together? John showed an interesting mapping between the fundamentals of these two architectural styles. Interesting, yes, but practical? Right now, no. But that is OK. Clearly this talk was intended to present these ideas to stimulate conversation and dialogue with the community.

It is great to see Microsoft working harder to engage with the developer and software architect communities.

I plan to closely watch how John and his group proceed on this topic — I am very interested in how Microsoft approaches Web 2.0 on every front.

Update: fixed capitalization of deVadoss — interesting business card, name and title are all lowercase.