Microsoft "Oslo," announced last month, is a grouping of products which will include BizTalk Server 6, BizTalk Services 1 (Internet Service Bus), .NET Framework 4, Visual Studio 10, and System Center 5. The focus of this service-oriented architecture (SOA) grouping will be on metadata, modeling, repositories, composite application development, and hosted services.

Commentary from Forrester on Oslo stresses that this is a major shift in interactions between IT services (development and administrative) and business. Microsoft technology will be able to capture an executable model of a business. This architecture, based on business design and business metadata, will make enterprises more agile. 

Here's what Forrester analyst Randy Heffner said, "If you view Oslo’s impact as simply improvements in application development productivity, tooling, and maintenance, you will miss the big picture. To be a strategic architecture leader, you must be prepared to help your enterprise think differently about the relationship between business and technology. . . An increasing range of business metadata is at the center of a tectonic shift in the focus of solution building and programming. Rather than applications being IT’s translations of selected business requirements, business technology solutions become direct reflections of the business design itself.”

For more on this see http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=1016

The Forrester executive summary http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44336,00.html