Microsoft Corp and New Era of Networks Inc got together this week to strengthen their relationship in the application integration space, laying out details for the future optimization and integration of Neon’s products on Microsoft’s Windows platform. As part of the announcement, Neon has become a partner in Microsoft’s BizTalk steering group and committed to endorse Microsoft’s BizTalk Framework and BizTalk products and tools.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft will jointly market Neon’s new eBiz 2000 integration product, announced earlier this week. The latter is the next generation version of Microscript’s Windows-based integration product, originally called Microscript Server. Microscript was acquired by Neon in June of this year. According to Venu Aravamudan, business development manager, business solutions group for Microsoft, it was Microscript’s relationship with Redmond that led to the extension of its relationship with Neon.
The strategic relationship with Neon was accelerated by its acquisition of Microscript, who’s always been a Microsoft-centric integration vendor, he said. Now the aim is to take the best of breed of both Neon’s and Microscript’s products, incorporate them and optimize them for Microsoft’s DNA [NT, SQL, Visual Studio] platform.
As well as co-marketing of the new eBiz2000 product, Aravamudan said Microsoft would also work to optimize both eBiz2000 and Neon’s own flagship product, eBiz Integrator, on its upcoming BizTalk server and next generation SNA Server product, code-named Babylon. The latter is Microsoft’s server designed to integrate Windows-based applications with IBM and other legacy applications.
He denied that there would be any potential competitive issues between what are essentially two very similar products; eBiz Integrator and BizTalk, adding that BizTalk was concerned with what he called low level plumbing integration, while Neon’s product is designed to address more low latency integration issues, such as stock trading environments that need high bandwidth capabilities to integrate applications.
That’s not where BizTalk is targeted, Aravamudan said, we see a lot of need for BizTalk for creating partner and supply chains scenarios, to create a common way of exchanging XML-based data and messages over the internet. He added that, down the line, he envisages components of Neon’s products (both eBiz Inegrator and eBiz 2000) being layered on top of BizTalk server to provide real-time hooks into ERP and legacy systems.
