Microsoft Beefs Up Solution Provider Training For BizTalk Server

Once Microsoft starts shipping its XML-based integration server, BizTalk 2000, in the next two weeks, a worldwide effort to get solution providers up to speed on the product will follow.

Dave Wascha, product manager for BizTalk, says Microsoft began its efforts to train its solution provider partners several months ago.

Once BizTalk ships, Microsoft will embark on a series of training seminars in major cities across the United States, including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit, as well as across Europe, Asia and the South Pacific, he says.

"Most product teams have several product managers, and training the partners is 20 percent of the time of one product manager," says Wascha. "We've hired two product managers devoted to training full-time for the BizTalk server, so that shows you how we are allocating [extra] resources."

Wascha estimates that Microsoft has put four times as many financial resources into making sure solution providers can deploy BizTalk in Windows-based solutions as soon as the product ships, which he expects will be "any day now."

Microsoft sent BizTalk Server 2000 to manufacturing in December.

"We really want to convey to partners the new projects they can take on with BizTalk," says Wascha. "Partners are going to be a huge channel [for selling BizTalk]. They really are our bread and butter."

BizTalk, one of the servers in Microsoft's .Net platform, is comprised of a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based XML framework and a security framework, says Wascha. Within the product are six development tools and two run-time environments.

Microsoft designed BizTalk to offer enterprise application integration, B2B integration and process automation in one product, Wascha says.

Combined with other platforms across the .Net product stack, including Commerce Server 2000 and SQL Server 2000, solution providers can build an end-to-end integration project using technology from a single vendor, says Wascha.

One solution provider who has been using a beta version of BizTalk for the past year says the server has saved his team time in deploying integration solutions.

Before using BizTalk, Rich Waller, CTO for Microsoft Solutions at integrator Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, says his team was writing code by hand to perform systems integration.

"We have found that early on, we had to do a lot [of coding for integration] ourselves," says Waller. "We've been lucky enough to be able to use [Microsoft] tools and in the last year we haven't had to create anything [ourselves]."

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