In a company where most of the 58,000 employees are paid to sweat the details, Microsoft Corp.s Pat Helland is somewhat of an anomaly. He is a big-picture thinker.
Nine-year Microsoft veteran Helland came to Microsoft from Tandem Computers, where he was chief architect and senior implementer of the transaction monitoring facility. He has done lots of work in high-end computing arenas, such as parallel processing, clustering, 64-bit computing and the like. He was one of the chief architects on the Microsoft Transaction Server.
Helland is now platform architect with the .Net Enterprise Architecture Team (NEAT) at Microsoft. NEAT is part of Corporate VP Sanjay Parthasarathys platform strategy and partner unit.
Microsoft has started throwing the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and service-oriented distributed system (SODS) buzzwords around quite a bit recently. Who better than Helland to help explain Microsofts long-term architectural vision?
To read the transcript of Microsoft Watch Editor Mary Jo Foleys e-mail Q&A with Helland,
click here.