David Chappell's Indigo Whitepaper
If you often find yourself looking for the right way to describe technology to business leaders, you may be familiar with David Chappell. He does a great job of presenting content in a way that is understandable. His latest is a white paper about Indigo. It is available now for download from MSDN. Now, I'm not saying that this is not a technical white paper. It is. I'm just saying that you should become familiar with David Chappell's other writings, as well.
Some clips...
1. "...Many people at Microsoft have devoted years of their lives to creating Indigo. This level of effort wouldn't have been necessary if the problems it solved were simple or if their solutions were obvious. Accordingly, Indigo is a substantial piece of technology. Three things stand out, however, as Indigo's most important aspects: its unification of several existing Microsoft technologies, its support for cross-vendor interoperability, and its explicit service-orientation."
2. "...Indigo represents a modern approach to creating distributed applications in the era of reliable, secure, and transactional services. A key point to understand, however, is that installing Indigo will not break any existing applications. Current code running on ASMX, .NET Remoting, and the other technologies whose functionality is subsumed by Indigo will continue to run, and so there's no requirement to move to Indigo. But for organizations with investments in current Microsoft technologies, an obvious question remains: what happens to existing code written using the technologies that preceded Indigo? "
3. "...Indigo represents an important evolution in how developers create software. As service-oriented applications become the norm, Indigo will be a mainstream technology for Windows software developers. Other Microsoft products will also change to take advantage of what Indigo offers. BizTalk Server, for example, will add support for Indigo as a communication option sometime following the release of BizTalk Server 2006. Because Indigo provides a standard foundation for service-oriented software, it will be the basis for a large fraction of Windows communication.
The impact of this technology will not be small. Anyone who builds distributed applications on Windows, especially applications that must interoperate with those on other platforms, should pay close attention. Indigo will significantly change their world."