Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009, the company’s enterprise integration and connectivity server solution. In its sixth release, BizTalk Server is already being used by 90 percent of Global 100 customers to integrate systems and automate processes.
BizTalk Server 2009 delivers new capabilities to help customers more effectively integrate disparate systems, enhance end-to-end enterprise connectivity and more quickly exchange data across multiple platforms, resulting in increased efficiency and lower costs.
“In today’s economy, it is more important than ever for Microsoft to deliver innovation that drives immediate customer value,” said Dan Neault, general manager of Microsoft SQL Server and BizTalk Server at Microsoft.
“With BizTalk Server 2009, Microsoft has delivered an enterprise-ready scalable platform that enables our customers across the globe to more efficiently connect processes, systems and data, which is critical to reducing costs and enabling informed business decisions across their organizations.”
Expanded Platform Support Enables More Flexible and Cost-Effective Systems
BizTalk Server 2009 expands support for the latest Microsoft application platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. With BizTalk Server 2009, customers can now utilize the improvements available within these Microsoft products to boost their integration initiatives through enhanced developer productivity, improved system performance and better manageability.
With Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Enterprise Edition, customers can further reduce the cost of infrastructure using Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology to run unlimited virtualized instances on virtual machines.
With upfront costs that are often less than offers from other vendors, BizTalk Server 2009 empowers customers to use industry standards and line-of-business adapters to more efficiently link partner as well as internal information systems across various domains.
The adapters available for BizTalk Server 2009 enable organizations to quickly and easily access and use data from mainframes, databases, third-party applications and radio frequency identification (RFID) devices using familiar, simple-to-use management and development tools with less complexity and lower costs.
Industry-leading companies around the globe are relying on BizTalk Server as their mission-critical business process management solution. Customers including American Apparel Inc., Continental Automotive, Florida Community College, Gulf Coast Seal Ltd. and Sempra Energy Solutions have been using BizTalk Server, and many have plans to upgrade to BizTalk Server 2009 to take advantage of the benefits provided with this latest release.
“We’ve been using Microsoft BizTalk Server products for years as the backbone for our electronic data interchange and order processing mechanism and more recently for our extranet account management process, and we continue to believe BizTalk Server is the best solution for our needs,” said Chris Lavoie, application development manager.
Enterasys Networks Inc. “We’re looking forward to upgrading our systems to BizTalk Server 2009 to take advantage of the improvements in this latest release such as enhanced business activity monitoring and tighter integration with the Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework, which will help to reduce our implementation and maintenance costs.”
New Capabilities Ease Connectivity to Systems and Data
The BizTalk Server 2009 release delivers the following:
- Simple, cost-effective service-oriented architecture (SOA) connectivity. With new and updated connectors, BizTalk Server 2009 advances interoperability by providing more than 25 industry adapters that make it easier for customers to connect critical business applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite.
- Increased developer productivity. BizTalk Server enhances the first-class developer experience provided within Visual Studio 2008 by offering new integrated capabilities including visual debugging, unit testing and access to code artifacts. As a result, BizTalk Server helps democratize and simplify sophisticated integration projects, enabling a broader set of developers to rapidly deliver more standards-based and scalable business applications.
- Better visibility into data and activities. Enhanced Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capabilities reduce the complexity associated with trusted data collection and simplify access to data.
- Take advantage of the benefits of virtualization. With BizTalk Server 2009 running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology, businesses can take advantage of the benefits that virtualization provides, including cost savings, production server consolidation and business continuity management.
- Simple RFID solutions. RFID capabilities reduce the need for complicated custom coding for disparate device types. Now, businesses can easily extend RFID capabilities to mobile environments and experience the benefits from updated standards such as Tag Data Translation (TDT), EPC Information Services Standard (EPCIS) and Low Level Reader Protocol (LLRP).
- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) made easier. BizTalk Server can now participate in the full application development life cycle by including new project management, testing and deployment capabilities that extend ALM capabilities already delivered through Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008. As a result, customers experience faster time to solution with improved quality.
BizTalk Server is a key component of the Microsoft Application Platform, a suite of products and technologies designed to help customers build, run and manage dynamic business applications. More information on the Microsoft Application Platform can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/applicationplatform.
Availability
BizTalk Server 2009 is available today to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) customers and will be made available broadly in nine languages — Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish — on May 1.
BizTalk Server 2009 is offered in four editions: Enterprise, Standard, Branch and Developer. Microsoft is providing customers with the added features and improvements in BizTalk Server 2009 with no price increase over previous versions, and is introducing the latest version of BizTalk Server with one of the lowest purchasing costs in the industry.
Customers interested in upgrading to BizTalk Server 2009 can access complete pricing and licensing information on May 1 for all versions of BizTalk Server 2009 at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/default.aspx.