Entities will help improve communication between business people and developers, said Lyn Robison, an analyst with the application platforms group at the Burton Group. "It will raise the level of abstraction so that you can begin to think of data from a business perspective, not just from a rows-and-tables-in-a-database perspective," Robison said.

"The idea of logical modeling is valuable and if the Entities technology helps facilitate that, that will be very useful," he said. However, it is too early to tell how successful Microsoft will be with Entities, Robison said.