What is Indigo in SOA World

Indigo combines support for Web services with transformation, intelligent routing and message-oriented middleware capabilities such as guaranteed delivery and publish-and-subscribe. Gartner classifies this type of middleware as an enterprise service bus (ESB).

Like other ESBs, Indigo has a distributed design and supports multiple protocols, communication patterns, network topologies and encoding formats such as XML. However, unlike other ESBs, Indigo is built into the operating system.

Indigo updates the Web services support and some other communication functions in the .NET framework. Indigo will include advanced Web services features, including security, transactions and management. Indigo will supersede all of Microsoft’s communication middleware, including COM, COM+, .NET remoting and Microsoft Message Queue Server, but will provide some backward compatibility to reduce coexistence and migration problems.