Microsoft Ships New BizTalk

Microsoft

BizTalk Server 2002, which the company positions as a big part of its application integration strategy, will make it easier for solution providers to create applications and services with the company's toolset and then link those XML-based Web services together, Microsoft said.

The software can work with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), which ships with Windows NT, for visual events monitoring, alerts, consolidation and reporting.

BizTalk itself supports events monitoring, but for automated viewing, it must be used in conjunction with MOM, said David Wascha, BizTalk product manager.

The BizTalk server is Microsoft's stab at Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and the company is following in its own footsteps by offering base-level functionality at a much less expensive price than competitors, said Shawn Willett, analyst with Current Analysis, Sterling, Va.

"If you're building an application with Visual Studio.net, you can, from within that environment, now create a Web service and make it callable from BizTalk. That means you can create an order system which takes an order and passes it along to your SAP system through BizTalk, which can also create business flows and represent them visually," Willett said.

BizTalk is important for solution providers who need to coordinate any number of applications and environments, said Dave Gill, director of software licensing for GreenPages, a Kittery, Maine-based solution provider. "I look at BizTalk as an orchestration server and it is a key part of the Microsoft .Net initiative. They want to orchestrate all these disparate environments, get them to talk to each other and integrate," he noted.

BizTalk's own Orchestrate feature lets integrators build workflow and represent it visually. On the down side, MOM provides another non-graphical representation of flow, so users have to deal with two interfaces, Willett said. Competitors like WebMethods centrally integrate business flow and its representations through its business process management tool. "Microsoft is not there yet, but it will be," Willett said.

BizTalk 2002 standard edition, a uniprocessor version for small and midsize businesses, costs $5,000. The enterprise edition, which can scale to up to 32 processors when running with Windows 2000 Data Center edition, costs $25,000 per processor. Visual Studio.Net itself is slated to be officially launched next week in San Francisco.