BIOS: Technology Means Business

BizTalk Server 2004 is a Windows server package designed to help your organisation integrate systems, employees and trading partners using Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and other core Internet transports and protocols. The third major release of Microsoft's business integration software offering, BizTalk Server 2004 succeeds BizTalk Server 2002 and allows organisations to orchestrate Web services and build dynamic business processes that span applications, platforms and businesses. Key enhancements include improved scalability, the addition of a business rules engine and the integration of BizTalk Server's development environment into the Visual Studio .NET user interface.

Pros: Improved scalability; includes business rules engine
Cons: Prices remain unchanged from the 2002 versions

Release: Microsoft has unveiled BizTalk Server 2004, an industry-leading integration solution and a member of the Windows Server System. Applications built with BizTalk Server 2004 run on the Microsoft .NET Framework, making it easier for customers to automate and manage complex business processes by integrating applications, trading partners and employees with BizTalk Server's highly scaleable process orchestration engine. BizTalk Server 2004 helps increase the productivity of information workers, IT professionals and developers with role-specific tools for developing, managing and accessing business processes in familiar environments such as the Microsoft Office System and Visual Studio .NET 2003. BizTalk Server 2004 was launched at the Silicon Valley Speaker Series.

'Today, enterprises face significant challenges in managing and automating increasingly disconnected business processes. BizTalk Server 2004 enables customers to manage and automate their business processes, while also giving users tools to design, deploy and monitor these processes in real time,' said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the E-Business Servers Group at Microsoft. 'Our early adopters have seen rapid time to value from their BizTalk Server 2004 solutions, and we are excited about delivering these same results to more customers today.'

Virgin Group, the world's leading multichannel music and entertainment retailer, operates 23 Virgin Megastores in North America, as well as stores throughout Europe and Japan. Virgin Megastores looked to reduce inventory loss across its stores - a battle that costs the entire industry $30bn (£16.4bn) a year. In an attempt to protect profits and decrease shrinkage from both employee and in-store theft, Virgin turned to Microsoft Certified Partner Xavor Corp. and BizTalk Server 2004 to develop an easy-to-use, real-time fraud-detection solution. The solution Xavor built for Virgin utilised BizTalk Server 2004, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Windows SharePoint Services and the Microsoft Office System. The result allowed Virgin's business analysts at each retail store to uncover, analyse and react in real time to fraudulent activities.

'As a global company, we strive to protect our profits by decreasing losses from fraud and theft. Inventory shrinkage is a high-priority issue we must continuously find creative solutions to address,' said Steven Winningham, senior vice president of operations and IT at Virgin Entertainment Group. 'In just the first month, the new BizTalk Server 2004 loss prevention management solution has detected 50 per cent more potential fraud cases than our previous solution and is much quicker. This is clear business value that Xavor and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 have delivered that has positively impacted our bottom line.'

In addition to the application integration capabilities found in previous versions, BizTalk Server 2004 delivers new capabilities to enable enterprises to more effectively manage and apply rules to business processes, connect to trading partners, and analyse the health of their business processes. The new functionality in BizTalk Server 2004 includes the following: Business process management (BPM) provides a highly scaleable messaging and orchestration engine with enterprise-class BPM capabilities, including support for Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), an emerging standard for linking business processes between trading partners, applications and business users.

Integration with Visual Studio .NET 2003 enables developers to build, orchestrate and manage business processes using a highly productive integrated development environment. Health Activity Tracking (HAT ) allows administrators to monitor and manage the health of their business processes within their BizTalk Server environments. Enterprise single sign-on streamlines the sign-on verification process for Windows and non-Windows users accessing line-of-business applications. Highly-scaleable business rule engine enables business analysts to create flexible and more-responsive rules and policies around business processes. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides information workers with real-time monitoring of business processes in familiar tools, such as Microsoft Office Excel or Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Enterprises have long wanted to link their back-end processes and data to their information workers and business analysts, enabling those workers to react to changes in their businesses in a more agile and accurate way. BizTalk Server's integration with the Microsoft Office System allows business analysts to collaborate with developers in the design and deployment of business processes and to connect desktops to data from back-end systems. BizTalk Server includes integration with Microsoft Office Visio 2003, Microsoft's diagramming and data visualisation tool that makes it possible for business analysts to collaborate with developers in the design and development of mission-critical business processes.

Using the business activity monitoring engine in BizTalk Server 2004, information workers can access data from business processes in real time from their desktop, allowing them to make decisions and react more quickly to changing business conditions. In addition, BizTalk Server can integrate directly with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003, a new information-gathering program that offers rich, dynamic forms to more effectively share, reuse and repurpose information to streamline business processes. Integrating InfoPath with BizTalk Server enables information workers to connect real-time data, such as patient health data, with mission-critical back-end systems, such as patient health records. All editions of BizTalk Server 2004 include a copy of InfoPath 2003.

Over the past several years, Microsoft has worked extensively with leading enterprise software and services companies during BizTalk Server 2004's development to ensure the product would be designed to work seamlessly and integrate with a wide collection of enterprise IT systems. As a result, BizTalk Server 2004 enjoys extensive industry support helping to extend the functional richness of BizTalk Server-based solutions. Independent software vendors continue to build adapters for BizTalk Server, allowing customers to integrate with virtually any application or technology protocol on the market. Additionally, Microsoft did extensive training with more than 1,500 system integrator consultants to prepare them to deliver BizTalk Server 2004-based solutions to their customers.

'Organisations seeking to become high-performing businesses need to streamline and connect business processes and systems to get better access to information about their enterprise,' said David Plesko, partner and enterprise integration lead for Accenture. 'Accenture is helping clients overcome this integration challenge through the use of BizTalk Server 2004. It helps us speed the delivery of new products and services while utilising existing systems. By leveraging Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 in our integration solutions, we can lower the total cost of ownership for the enterprise and give businesses greater clarity around the real-time data they need to make critical business decisions.'

BizTalk Server 2004 has been released to manufacturing and will be generally available on April 1, 2004. Customers can download an evaluation copy of BizTalk Server 2004 today at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/downloads/, and developers with MSDN Universal subscriptions can download the Developer Edition at http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/downloads/default.asp. BizTalk Server 2004 costs $24,999 (£13,674) per CPU for the Enterprise Edition, $7,000 (£3,828) per CPU for the Standard Edition and $999 (£546) or the Partner Edition. Microsoft will offer BizTalk Server 2004 in nine languages: English, French , German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.

Links:
BizTalk Server 2004 Web site