Microsoft Continues Innovation in BizTalk Server Product Family

Customers benefit from increased efficiency in extending and connecting enterprise applications with BizTalk RFID Mobile and the BizTalk Server 2009 beta.

LAS VEGAS — Today at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit, Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability of BizTalk RFID Mobile and the BizTalk RFID Standards Pack, as well as the first public beta of BizTalk Server 2009 for download. Together, these releases demonstrate Microsoft’s continued commitment to the BizTalk Server product family, which helps enable customers to achieve enhanced end-to-end enterprise connectivity across the business and provides them with a clear, accurate view into their day-to-day operations.

“Our customers are looking for additional ways to extend and connect their existing applications, and to deliver new projects more rapidly,” said Oliver Sharp, general manager of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. “The BizTalk product family delivers a tremendous set of enterprise connectivity capabilities ‘in the box’ for heterogeneous environments at a fraction of the price of any comparable solution in the market today.”

BizTalk RFID Mobile, which is generally available today, extends the power of BizTalk Server RFID to mobile devices running Windows Mobile and Windows CE. In addition, BizTalk RFID Mobile delivers simple device management and offline processing capabilities, all of which help reduce the total cost of ownership. Customers are already seeing benefits from deploying mobile radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions on the new platform. Rite Care Pharmacy Inc., a growing retail chain and one of 8,200 BizTalk customers worldwide, worked with Microsoft partner S3Edge Software to cut its order fulfillment time and inventory space requirements in its warehouses in half.

“With BizTalk RFID Mobile, we can quickly decide where a product needs to go as soon as we receive it, removing several steps in the inventory stocking process,” said Seshu Guddanti, managing director at Rite Care Pharmacy. “This helped us to reduce our turnaround time from four days to two days.”

With the public beta release of BizTalk Server 2009, Microsoft is delivering the first customer preview of the multirelease road map announced in September 2008 and is giving customers the first look of the feature-complete download. BizTalk Server 2009 supports the latest Microsoft application platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. BizTalk Server 2009 also delivers expanded new connectivity options including new integration with Oracle Corp.’s E-Business Suite, as well as updated platform support for the most recent versions of IBM Corp.’s Customer Information Control System (CICS), Information Management System (IMS), DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database and WebSphere MQ.

Customers also will benefit from BizTalk Server updates in key enterprise focus areas, including connectivity, visibility and platform support, which extend their investments in existing infrastructure, people and applications. BizTalk Server 2009 also delivers improved scalability and reliability through support for SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization and enhanced failover clustering. It provides significant new enhancements to both individual and team productivity by enabling new interoperability with Microsoft’s application life-cycle management (ALM) solution: Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server. This allows development teams to utilize the integrated source control, bug tracking, team development support, Project Server integration, and support for automating builds via MSBuild for a more seamless development and testing experience.

In addition, customers and partners can now expedite development of RFID applications in heterogeneous environments with BizTalk Server support for RFID standards, Tag Data Translation (TDT) and Low Level Reader Protocol (LLRP). Also being released today is a community technology preview of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance 2.0, which delivers updated prescriptive guidance for applying ESB usage patterns with improved itinerary processing, itinerary modeling using a visual domain-specific language (DSL) tools approach, a pluggable resolver-adapter pack and an enhanced ESB management portal.

Availability and Licensing

BizTalk RFID Mobile is available at no cost to all BizTalk Server customers with Microsoft Software Assurance as well as new BizTalk Server customers who purchase an edition of BizTalk with Software Assurance. When BizTalk Server 2009 becomes generally available, customers will be able to acquire BizTalk RFID Mobile as part of the software license. The BizTalk Server 2009 public beta is available for download and community feedback today at http://connect.microsoft.com. Customers and partners are encouraged to begin developing and testing solutions on this feature-complete beta, and to provide feedback for the final release due in the first half of 2009. As previously announced, Microsoft will continue to target updates of BizTalk Server every two years.

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