It may not be as sexy as Windows Vista or Office 2007, but BizTalk Server
remains a core piece of Microsoft’s middleware.
The company said today that it has released to manufacturing BizTalk Server
2006, a business process management (BPM) server that helps customers
integrate applications within Microsoft environments.
BPM software helps distributed computing systems, such as service-oriented
architectures (SOA)
BizTalk Server 2006, last upgraded in 2004, has a number of new features
that help customers corral Web services and turn them into actionable
business processes, said Steven Martin, director of product management for
BizTalk Server 2006.
The product upgrades easily from BizTalk 2004, and has a new, unified
management console via a portal, application-level management, as well as
easier configuration.
“When you’re orchestrating lots of Web services together to form a complex
business process, management is popping up as a pretty key item,” Martin said.
There are also 12 new adapters, or hooks to software from Siebel, Oracle,
PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards, as well as real-time business activity monitoring
alerts to give customers insight into their processes.
Martin said the new features mesh with the work that BizTalk Server’s 6,000
customers have done the last few years, integrating multiple, disparate
pieces of software to make them work in one system.
The executive said Microsoft made the improvements to accommodate customers
building new processes on a management tool to extract business logic out of
an off-the-shelf application.
BizTalk Server, which may be integrated with Microsoft SharePoint
collaboration software, will be available May 1 in 32- and 64-bit versions.
The software will come in three editions and will include Host Integration
Server, Microsoft’s AS400 and mainframe integration software.
Priced at $8,499, the standard edition is limited to two CPUs on a single
server and comes with five BizTalk applications. The enterprise edition
costs $29,999 and is unlimited in scale out, clustering and BizTalk
applications.
For $499, users can get a developer’s edition that allows programmers to
test the product. It’s also free with MSDN Universal.
Microsoft sees its BPM software as a key piece of infrastructure on which
Web services and service-oriented architectures are built.
Rival middleware providers IBM, Oracle and BEA Systems seem to agree on
the importance of BPM. IBM issued a
WebSphere Processor Server last year.
Oracle purchased Collaxa and injected
its assets into its Fusion Middleware. Most recently, BEA bought
Fuego Systems to boost its BPM capabilities.
