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Microsoft Buys EAI Adapters from iWay, Unveils BizTalk Server 2006 Beta 1

Microsoft bolstered its enterprise application integration (EAI) position this week when it obtained the rights to eight .NET-based adapters for BizTalk Server developed by iWay Software, whose business is making just about any adapter or connector you can think of. The transaction, which Microsoft called an acquisition, will see Microsoft take control of eight connectors designed to heighten integration with enterprise applications from Oracle(including its PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards ERP suites),Siebel Systems, Amdocs, and TIBCO Software. Microsoft says these adapters will become available from Microsoft in 2006. iWay says customers that have already purchased licenses for these .NET-based adapters will receive a license for the corresponding Microsoft adapter--as soon as they buy a Software Assurance plan from Microsoft. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced the first beta version of BizTalk Server 2006 is now available. BizTalk Server 2006 is currently slated to be launched this November alongside SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. To sign up for the new beta, click here.

Ballmer Says Innovation is Critical to Microsoft's Game

In what sounds like an exercise in stating the obvious, Microsoft, chief executive Steve Ballmer took the occasion at a recent financial analyst meeting to say innovation is critical to the sustained growth of his company. Some of his suggestions as to where the innovations would occur might have raised some eyebrows, however. . "There is no way for our company to grow without innovation," Ballmer said. "We'll achieve that growth not only by focusing on our anchor businesses but by competing and winning in a wide range of new services, many of them based on advertising or subscription revenue, and by creating a new portfolio of products that meet the growing needs of our customers." Ballmer highlighted several areas where Microsoft will need to be particularly innovative, including games, entertainment, search, mobile, and business applications. Windows shops shouldn't be concerned that Microsoft, as a company, is concentrating as much on the next Xbox 360 game or Microsoft TV as on the next release of Exchange Server or the planned merging of the four ERP suites sold through Microsoft Business Solutions. "This is not a set of unconnected experiences. We see synergy across what we do in these areas: synergy in user experiences, in the way people build and manage software, synergy between entertainment and communications scenarios, information access, and business and e-commerce," Ballmer says.

Speech Server Functions to be Integrated into Exchange, Microsoft Says

Driver's license renewal and password reset are some of the ways that government entities and companies are utilizing Microsoft Speech Server 2004, the software giant announced yesterday from the SpeechTEK Exposition and Educational Conference in New York City. Microsoft, which launched Speech Server 2004 R2 in May (see "Speech Server 2004 R2 On Tap from Microsoft"), says Speech Server 2004 is being used at 60 locations now, including the most recent implementations at Fingerhut, King Pharmaceuticals, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. Microsoft also announced it will be integrating speech technologies into a future release of Microsoft Exchange Server. "We're very excited about this partnership with Exchange and believe that offering speech-enabled unified messaging capabilities to the millions of Exchange users will go a long way to help achieve the goal of driving speech mainstream," said Rich Bray, general manager of the Speech Server Group at Microsoft.

Microsoft to Battle Google in Geek Trivia Game at LinuxWorld

What's the only thing stranger than Microsoft giving sessions at a Linux industry conference? If you said participating with search rival Google, whom it filed a lawsuit against two weeks ago, while at a Linux conference, you must be psychic, because that's exactly what Microsoft is gearing up to do next week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. Representatives from Microsoft and Google (probably not Kai-Fu Lee) will go head-to-head in the "Golden Penguin Bowl," which LinuxWorld promoter IDG bills as a "geek trivia game," next Thursday at 4:30 p.m. sharp. But it won't be all fun and games for Microsoft at LinuxWorld. Bill Hilf, the company's director of platform technology strategy, will be giving a session titled "Managing Linux in a mixed environment...at Microsoft?: A look inside the Linux/Open Source Software lab at Microsoft."

Retailer Adopts Windows-Based Supply Chain Software from JDA Software

Casino Group, a $29-billion food retailer with more than 8,300 stores on four continents, will be one of the first large retailers to implement JDA Software's next-generation, .NET replenishment software, the software developer announced this week. Casino Group, which expressed some interesting views on the evolving role of ERP in the retail environment, bought a license for the Windows-based Portfolio Replenishment Optimization by E3 during the second quarter. "Our vision for a best-in-class supply chain is that everyone from the store to the warehouse will be in synch with a single demand-forecast based on sales," says Jean-Luc Galzi, president of information technology for Casino Group. "I am confident that JDA shares our vision and has the best solution in the market to strategically transform our operations." The French company considered writing its own ERP system before settling on JDA's offering. "I strongly believe that ERP is less appropriate in retail because these systems favor data integration to the disadvantage of flexible processes," Galzi says. "While ERP is a good solution in environments such as finance, accounting, and manufacturing, where processes are stable and repeatable from one company to the next, ERP is not right for retail." The large ERP vendors may one day get the knowledge and expertise to deliver solutions that support the fast pace of retail, he added, "but I don't see it in the short term and certainly not today."

KCI Updates Excel-Based Business Intelligence Tool

KCI Computing recently shipped a new release of CONTROL, a business intelligence tool that can pull data from SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, DB2 UDB, DB2/400, and other data stores in real time, and uses Microsoft Excel as its primary user interface for creating up-to-the-minute forecasts and budgets. Providing an Excel front end to a relational online analytical processing (ROLAP) server enables non-technical users to slice and dice data, to build colorful graphs, and to drill down to any level of detail, without having to worry about periodically synchronizing their spreadsheet with the latest data or manually re-typing data into Excel, which can introduce errors, company officials say. With CONTROL version 8.7, the company has added several new features. On occasion, users will need access to the tool for a short period of time to build one-off reports, and this is now possible through new ad-hoc reporting capabilities in CONTROL. New "sheet refinements" in version 8.7 should make it easier for users to customize their Excel interfaces with new buttons that do things like open a book or a view, navigate to a particular report or entry form, run a transform or a mapping, or navigate to a home menu, the company says. Administrators can make better use of their server's time with the new "remote asynchronous" job module, which lets administrators set CONTROL tasks to run on different servers, or at odd hours. Lastly, the computational overhead of accessing commonly accessed reports from relatively static data can be minimized with the new "view snapshots" feature. Pricing for the software starts at $$23,500.

This article has been corrected. Pricing for KCI Computing's CONTROL software begins at $23,500. IT Jungle regrets the error. [Correction made 08/09/05].