Oslo- a Biztalk replacement, next generation services bus, BPM platform or all of the above?

When talking to people about Oslo, I think that people have a lot of questions. Here are some that come up in many of my conversations:

• “Oslo- is that Microsoft’s next Web services platform?”
• “How does Oslo integrate with and/or replace BizTalk Server?”
• “Is Oslo Microsoft’s answer to ESB?”
• “Does Oslo become Microsoft’s BPM platform?”

These questions and many other arise when people first hear about Oslo. And I think the answer is that Oslo in some ways is *could be* a little bit of all of these things that people wonder about. To learn more about Oslo, check out these sessions at the upcoming PDC in late October.

UPDATE: Best to quote the source directly, and it just so happens that Doug Purdy, Product Unit Manager for Oslo, has a summary of what Oslo is and what people should expect to learn more about at the PDC. He writes the following:

[W]e have boiled down Oslo to three very simple things:

• 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 relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components

 

That is it.  That is all Oslo is.  Oslo is just the modeling platform.

Based on what I have seen, people will see Oslo as a platform but will probably think most about what it enables them to do. Because of that, the questions I’ve been hearing will not subside, but at least the answer will more clearly lie in Oslo’s applications as a platform for service enablement.