While not widely considered in theenterprise except within certain verticals, such as manufacturing, roboticstechnology is today available to a broad software developer segment and isexpected to be more and more present in the enterprise architectural landscape.With that in mind, we interviewed two thought leaders in the Microsoft RoboticsGroup about their careers and the future of robotics in the enterprise.

AJ: Who are you, and what do you do?

TT: I’m Tandy Trower.I’m the general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group and founder of theRobotics initiative at Microsoft.

HFN: My name isHenrik Frystyk Nielsen. I am the group program manager in the MicrosoftRobotics Group, and I’m very excited about bringing robotics intoline-of-business (LOB) applications.

AJ: Robotics would seemto be a far remove from traditional LOB applications. Where do these domainsmeet?

TT: Let me answerthat by describing the origins of the robotics initiative. The roboticscommunity is quite diverse, from research on cutting-edge technologies (such asthe Dynamic Source Routing protocol in the DARPA urban challenge) to very earlysegments of the commercial industries, as well as the existing industrialautomation segment that’s looking for new marketplaces. The robotics community,through its various representatives, asked Microsoft for software assets thatwould address such challenges as maintainability and distributed concurrentapplications.

When I presented this proposal first to Bill Gates and CraigMundie, Craig pointed out that he had been incubating a new piece of technologyto deal with the challenges of loosely coupled asynchronous distributedsoftware. Henrik was a part of the team that created these. Although Henrik’steam did not have robotics in mind originally, the problem set that they weresolving was very similar to the problem set the robotics community was facing.

These technologies, known today as CCR (Concurrency andCoordination Runtime) and DSS (Decentralized Software Services), form thefoundation of the robotics toolkit. The core services of the robotics toolkit,to this day, have remained a general purpose programming application to dealwith asynchronous applications. CCR is the piece that allows you to grappleeasily with the challenges of writing an application on a multicore ormultiprocessor system. DSS is that companion piece for scaling out across thenetwork that allows you to have a consistent programming model locally andacross the network and across heterogeneous types of devices.

As soon as we made the robotics toolkit available to themarketplace, customers outside of the robotics space started taking a look andkind of lifted up the hood and said, “That engine is good for my kind ofapplications, too. I have the same kind of problem.”

HFN: We recognizedearly on that more and more applications today are connections of looselycoupled components, and the challenge is about orchestration, about services.We wanted to bring a high-level application model to bear that inherently knowshow to stitch together loosely coupled components. Bad things can happen—eachcomponent can fail at any point in time—but you want the application tosurvive, you don’t want it to just roll over and die. And at the same time wehad to deal with and harness concurrency for better scale, betterresponsiveness, and applications that don’t fail.

Some customers recognized their own problem space based on thedescription of the basic components. For example, financial trading systemspeople said, “This is exactly about lots of data coming in, figuring out whento trade, and when not to, with independent agencies looking at the data withdifferent viewpoints and decision making process flows”—a complex applicationthat turns out to be similar to a robotics application where your informationcomes from the wheels, the lasers, and whatever else, and you have to decide,should I stop or go.

Other customers came from the robotics side. Robotics in factis a great enabler. We had hobbyist roboticists come to us saying, “I’ve playedwith this toolkit over the weekend to build a robot, then I came into work andrealized that I could apply the same matrices that I had done over the weekendto solve the problem in the enterprise.”

TT: Until now, we’vebundled these assets into the robotics toolkit, but increasingly, customersoutside the robotics space are saying, “These are very valuable assets, why dowe have to buy a robotics toolkit to get them?” So, we will be addressing thatby offering these components in a more palatable way to those customers; ratherthan having to buy them under the robotics cover, they’ll be able to get thoseassets directly.

AJ: What advice, notnecessarily related to robotics, would you share with aspiring architects?

TT: Look for wherethings are going, keep an eye open to new opportunities. Certainly, atMicrosoft there are leadership opportunities and opportunities for differentkinds of leaders. Some leaders, like myself, are better in startup types ofactivities; others are better at maintaining stable organizations that aremature.

HFN: When you get toan expert level of understanding in a certain area, there’s a tendency to diveinto that area and forget some of the other areas around you. You naturallybuild cultural walls between your area of knowledge and what you think otherareas are doing. The experience of our team certainly demonstrates the benefitof breaking down those walls, being able to step back and recognize there’s acommunity, that there’s very great overlap we better talk with each other. It’sa huge advantage and I think it’s something that characterizes a great leader.

AJ: The architect rolerequires understanding technical trends to get the best business benefit. Howdo you stay up to date?

TT: The Web providesalmost unlimited ways for connecting—blogs, forums, feeds, virtual libraries,wikis. Attending related conferences is another good way. A lot of the peoplein this industry are very heads down and focused. I think part of stayingcurrent is simply taking the time to look up and notice what else is going on.You might find some synergies there that you never even considered.

HFN: Just 10, 15years ago, it was about getting information; now the challenge has become filteringthe information. When there’s so much information that you can’t possiblyconsume it, you have to rely on new mechanisms. Figuring out how to gethigh-quality information about the things that actually solve problems is acritical task. Blogs, social networks, and newsfeeds of all kinds are a start.

AJ: Name the mostimportant person you have ever met in this industry. What made him or her soimportant?

TT: There are somany. Of course, Bill Gates: He’s the reason I’ve been at Microsoft for as longas I have. Also, our more direct sponsor, Craig Mundie. Craig has been mymanager a number of different times and is one of the forward-lookingexecutives at Microsoft, having the ability to see where things are going, andthen allowing me to participate, through what he was doing, and actuallyinnovate in some of those areas.

HFN: I would addfrom my perspective Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, whose story shows howa single person effectively changed how the world operates today—from how we towork to how we talk.

AJ: If you could turnthe clock back on your career, would you do anything differently?

HFN: Obviously, youthink of many of your choices as discrete decisions, so it’s funny how veryplanned and deliberate your career appears in hindsight. I’m fortunate to havehad many opportunities come my way. If you’re in a position where manyopportunities arise, chances are good that an avenue will be open for you whenyou are ready for the challenge. But if you are in a situation where nothingreally comes by, then you might be ready for a long time before an opportunitymaterializes.

TT: When I thinkthrough all of my life experiences and career experiences, I’ve always had achance to kind of reinvent myself; it has been very satisfying to work in newareas. If anything, I would advise anyone to just be more aware of the factthat things never remain the same, that the industry evolves, so don’t to gettoo stuck on anything, because the landscape is going to change. Microsoft hashad to work very hard to maintain its edge, and it only does that by continuingto refresh itself and to look to new things. So, stay fluid, and roll with thepunches.

AJ: What does the futurelook like? What do you hope to accomplish in the next few years?

TT: Well, the roboticstoolkit is part of a fairly ambitious goal to create a platform that wouldallow a new industry to emerge. Robotics has traditionally been in theindustrial sector; a new business is now emerging from the personal side ofrobotics. Personal robotics has not arrived yet, but in many ways, it maps tothe early PC industry of the late 1970s: When PCs first entered themarketplace, they kind of looked like toys. There wasn’t a clear understandingof what they were useful for.

Ultimately, I see robotics everywhere—like PCs, a verypervasive and ubiquitous technology. That’s going to take time, but I dobelieve that we will start to see that happen in three to five years.

HFN: I agree.Robotics has been on the edge for a long time, but it’s getting close to takingoff in dramatic ways. It’s is going to drive how we interact with informationand how we communicate, in social settings and industrial settings.

TT: One marvel ofhuman design is that we are built from very simple processors that aremassively connected together. The present computing paradigm is as if we’vecreated a brain out of a single neuron. We’ve done wonderful things with it,but now we have the potential to define a technology that’s analogous tomultiple neurons interacting together in a network effect. That’s reflectedalso in our social networks, ecological networks, or whatever you want to talkabout that’s in some sense living.

Robotics represents the paradigm shift in the evolution of PCtechnology. The future is not going to be a single core processor sitting onyour desk. You can now use technologies like CCR and DSS to develop a newgeneration of applications. It’s going to open up some significant horizons. Roboticsis just the starting point.

This article was published in the Architecture Journal, a printand online publication produced by Microsoft. For more articles from thispublication, please visit the Architecture Journal Web site.