Beyond AI protocols: Preparing for MCP and A2A in production

"The future of enterprise architecture is increasingly being written by AI, but not the kind you access through a single prompt and wait for an answer. The next wave of AI is agentic: composed of distributed, autonomous processes that perceive, reason, and act across enterprise environments. New protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent2Agent) have drawn excitement with their promise of standardizing how AI agents autonomously discover and interact with enterprise systems, and even other agents."

"So what can we learn from the microservices transformation that might help us best position our infrastructure for the agentic wave? To answer that, we first need to understand where we stand today. Where are we now in the agentic architecture journey? Agentic AI is still in its formative stages. Most organizations are discovering and experimenting. Some are just beginning to understand what agent-to-agent communication could enable. Others are starting to build bridges between AI models and enterprise systems."

Agentic AI consists of distributed, autonomous processes that perceive, reason, and act across enterprise environments. New protocols such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent2Agent) aim to standardize how agents discover and interact with systems and other agents. MCP has achieved broader early adoption, being positioned as a "USB-C for enterprise data access" and is in use by hundreds of companies and providers. A2A remains more ambitious and less mature. Many organizations are still experimenting, building bridges between models and enterprise systems, and must prepare data and application infrastructures by applying lessons from the microservices transition.

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