On May 1st, Microsoft officially announced that they have acquired Covast B2B technology to incorporate it in a next version of BizTalk Server. See Steven Martin’s (Director of Marketing for the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft) blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/05/01/enhancements-to-biztalk-b2b-functionality.aspx for the details on the deal.
As the CTO and co-founder of Covast and the architect of the technology, I’m personally quite proud of this! BizTalk Server (probably an “Advanced B2B Pack” for BizTalk Server R3 – final plans not ready yet) will incorporate our technology to provide the advanced B2B features that we’ve developed and sold in the past 12+ years. Our EDI Accelerator for BizTalk Server 2000 was the first B2B add-on specifically for BizTalk Server and we’ve continued to develop new releases for each new BizTalk Server version, including the current R2 release. Today, more than 500 customers actually use our software in combination with BizTalk Server.
We’ve always worked very closely together with Microsoft and the fact that they have now acquired our technology to become part of the BizTalk Server product was only something that was bound to happen in the end.
We will of course continue to provide the level of support and services to our current customers that they’ve grown accustomed to and we will also continue to develop great new products, like the BizTalk Server based B2B Appliance BBot and … stay tuned for more exciting news in the near future.
indaField 