Tony Baer's one of the analysts who's picked up on Microsoft's recent announcement that it's joining the OMG and backing UML and BPMN. His post is pretty interesting and outlines some of the relevant history—particularly relating to DSLs and the OMG's UML. But I'd like to add to that, and talk a bit about what the announcement means to the IT industry and the wider community of enterprise software developers.

Ignoring the "bringing modelling to the mainstream" spin that Microsoft has put on the announcement, Microsoft joining the OMG is a good thing for all concerned. Modelling is already a mainstream activity to most involved directly with the production of software, whether in the software vendor community or the wider software developer community. What it isn't, for the most part, is consistent, fully-integrated or shared within and across organisations—or seen by enterprises as something with real strategic importance.

Modelling holds great powers for shared communication between stakeholders. Through the power of abstraction and collective representation, model-driven development is an efficient and effective way of communicating requirements, goals and outcomes against the backdrop of existing constraints and platforms, and then automating the activities of the delivery process (i.e. development, testing and production) to ensure that what is deployed works how it was intended to (and to a sufficient level of quality).

So Microsoft's commitment to the OMG, simply put, finally gives model-driven software development a truly united voice—and also an united industry body for driving the education and strategic importance of modelling to the wider community. The environment and process framework created and managed by the OMG for collaboration, sharing strategy, and generating best practices, that ultimately get incorporated into standards, has strong input from end user organisations and commercial vendors alike. A supply community that is united behind a common industry body is an important criterion for helping to drive modelling and model-driven development being seen as strategically important activities beyond the confines of the software vendor community.

Ultimately this announcement says a lot about how far both Microsoft and the OMG have come (in equal measures), the importance of modelling for the future of software for all concerned—enterprises in particular—and a recognition from Microsoft that it does actually need the OMG. The OMG needs Microsoft too (but perhaps a little less so in my opinion).

Microsoft joins the OMG with proven technology and a vision that makes it as good a first-class citizen as IBM with its Rational toolset and strong contribution to modelling technology (an aside: the Microsoft-OMG "war" was never really about the OMG per se, but rather about IBM Rational's dominance). Microsoft has realised the power and importance of UML and the wide adoption within the market. As Tony correctly mentioned, this was vital if Microsoft was to progress with Oslo.

The outcome here is that debate (and vital energy) is no longer focused on the political and market agendas of the modelling tool vendors. Don't get me wrong, there are still political and market agendas in play, there always will be. But for the meantime and in general these will play out more "behind the scenes" than before—and that has to be good for everyone.