HOUSTON -- The future of application development for Microsoft is steeped in software modeling, particularly as the company moves more of its assets to a cloud-based computing model. Microsoft's modeling initiative is codenamed "Oslo."

In an interview with eWEEK at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference here, Steven Martin, senior director of product management in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division (CSD), said he has been working to dispel a lot of the skepticism about modeling in some circles. Indeed, mostly there has been more of a misperception about what modeling means, particularly to Microsoft, Martin indicated.

"Modeling today for most people is really about application workflow," Martin said. "But that misses the large point," he said, noting that as companies move into a services world where many of the components of applications they use were not written by the organization, there is a need for modeling to help bring those services together more easily than having to write code.

Also, in a virtualized environment where an application outgrow its hardware capacity and has to move to cloud-based assets, modeling can help to set up how the application should scale. In addition, for managing these complex services- based applications, enterprises will need to get policy information for the services that is easier done via modeling rather than writing code, Martin said.

"When you move from service orientation to virtualization, modeling goes from a 'nice-to-have' to a 'must-have.'"

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