Interview With Microsoft’s Eric Swift

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Eric Swift, lead product manager for .NET Enterprise Servers, plays a strategic role in Microsoft’s (www.microsoft.com) efforts to create and deploy Web services technologies, a key growth area for the company and the IT industry as a whole. Swift came to this role a year ago after holding a series of executive responsibilities that gave him extensive experience in integration software and enterprise applications. Technology writer Alan Joch spoke with Mr. Swift to discuss how large enterprises can take advantage of Microsoft BizTalk Server and iWay solutions to quickly deploy XML-based business processes, extend the life of legacy systems, and provide a foundation for the widespread integration of Web services.

IB MAGAZINE: How many BizTalk servers has Microsoft deployed thus far?

SWIFT: Our latest count put the number at well over 1,400 customers, and growing quickly. The growth includes not only new customers signing up for the first time, but also customers that already had purchased the technology and are now increasing their investment.

IB MAGAZINE: Are you seeing this growth in any particular vertical markets?

SWIFT: We’re seeing growth all over, in all the major verticals, including government, manufacturing (in automotive and electronics), chemical and energy processing, healthcare, and education. We have a few industry-specific templates, which we call accelerators, for healthcare and electronics manufacturing, which of course helps our growth in those areas. And we’re doing well both nationally and internationally.

IB MAGAZINE: Can you describe for us exactly what BizTalk Server does?

SWIFT: BizTalk Server integrates and orchestrates XML Web services and other system interfaces. Back when Microsoft decided to make a strategic bet on XML and related standards, it became clear to us that businesses needed a way to translate information between different data formats and sometimes even between XML documents because of differences in semantics. We realized that an XML integration and orchestration engine would be ideal in the marketplace.That early thinking became the first phase of our Web services strategy. Information Builders has had a long relationship with Microsoft, and iWay’s adapter technologies are an excellent complement to our XML strategy.

IB MAGAZINE: When did these early discussions begin?

SWIFT: The very beginning work on BizTalk Server began about four years ago. BizTalk Server was officially released in December of 2000. In February of this year, we introduced BizTalk Server 2002, with added management and deployment tools, in addition to add-ons for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit. Through tight integration with Microsoft Application Center 2000, BizTalk Server 2002 decreases project development costs and implementation time by streamlining the deployment of integration projects and by making it easier to scale projects to meet capacity demands. iWay’s Adapter offering integrates seamlessly with BizTalk Server 2002 via Web services to work with their large number of supported applications and enterprise data sources.

IB MAGAZINE: What are BizTalk Server’s major components?

SWIFT : BizTalk Server has two basic components.The first is what we call the messaging engine, which receives data, parses it, and then routes it to the proper destination. It can translate data for specific target systems, which includes everything from simple mapping to another data format to enriching the data via database lookups and calculations. We have received numerous accolades for our data mapper. It uses a graphical tool that generates XSLT [Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations]. The mapper’s benefits lie in the power and speed of the transformations it can perform combined with its easy-to-use interface.

The second component is the orchestration engine, which manages business processes. For example, when an order comes in from a Web site, this component can check the inventory level of the product, validate customer credit, and perform the other tasks necessary for processing the order.

These two components are tightly integrated to work together seamlessly. But you can also break out the individual pieces for scalability.

IB MAGAZINE: Scalability is important for large enterprises. Tell us more about how BizTalk Server handles this challenge.

SWIFT: We have a really strong scalability story because the BizTalk Server architecture lets you surgically scale. So, if a particular process sees heavy demand in the database or on the receive side, for example, you can implement additional computing power on the individual servers and scale where you need it. BizTalk Server can scale up by adding additional processors. It can also scale out because it supports clustering of the database and the BizTalk Server engines, so you can dedicate a number of servers to the same application, also giving our customers high availability. When considering scalability requirements, it is important that the adapter technology also scales along with the integration server. iWay’s enterprise scalable offering fits right into our scalability story making them a solid choice for our customers.

IB MAGAZINE: What are BizTalk Server’s competitive advantages?

SWIFT: We’ve done a lot of analysis of competitive wins, and what we’ve seen is that while the overall IT market has stagnated, we’ve grown. Our customers consistently say it’s because of BizTalk Server’s ease of use and its deployment effectiveness.We can put together a complete solution for a customer that’s anywhere from twice-as-fast to an order-of-magnitude faster to deploy than if the company used competing systems. That, of course, also leads to flexibility of deployment – you don’t have to mold your business to our product, BizTalk Server molds to your business processes and requirements. That, combined with proven scalability make the offering really compelling. We have customers that have pushed our product to the limit and still enjoy high availability. The final advantage is the pricing.

Because of our ability to generate higher volumes, we can price the product favorably. These advantages led iWay to decide to make BizTalk Server an integral part of their product offerings, and now they’ve become an official reseller of BizTalk Server.

IB MAGAZINE: In layman’s terms, can you explain for us Microsoft’s .NET strategy?

SWIFT: I would characterize it as having two pillars.The first one is connectivity – the ability to connect across multiple platforms for disparate applications using XML Web services. With .NET, this is all based on standards we’ve worked with the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] to implement, including WSDL [Web Services Description Language] and SOAP. These standards allow different systems to be exposed as XML systems. The second piece of .NET is the development tools and servers, with applications like Visual Studio .NET and the SOAP Toolkit, which allow you to build Web services, orchestrate processes, and deploy solutions.

IB MAGAZINE: How does BizTalk Server fit into the overall .NET strategy?

SWIFT: BizTalk Server is the perfect complement. Once those systems are exposed as Web services, you now need to interact with them. BizTalk Server orchestrates everything into a seamless business process. For example, before a Web site takes a customer order, you might want to check inventory levels and the customer’s credit, and validate the customer’s profile. Those processes might span multiple systems. BizTalk Server sits in the middle and when users sign on, they participate in that process without knowing what’s going on behind the scenes. BizTalk Server can orchestrate all these separate elements and allow enterprises to build robust processes.

IB MAGAZINE: What role do iWay’s adapters play in your vision of enterprise integration?

SWIFT: Our vision is very straightforward. If you take an application and wrap it with an adapter, you now have a system that can talk XML and perform Web services. With iWay, this applies to widely diverse enterprise applications and data sources, such as SAP, Siebel, and Peoplesoft, as well as to legacy systems, such as CICS,VSAM, and others. So you can take a mainframe CICS system, put an adapter in front of it, and expose those native interfaces as Web services interfaces. Then any application can communicate with it across a TCP/IP network. So we regard iWay’s family of around 200 such adapters as an excellent complement to BizTalk Server’s value for enterprise users.

IB MAGAZINE: Why is Microsoft relying upon vendors such as iWay to deliver adapter technology?

SWIFT: Adapters are complicated pieces of software.They require deep expertise to create and maintain. Microsoft wants to be in the business of building the orchestration engine – BizTalk Server – and then we want to work with experts such as iWay and take advantage of their expertise in legacy systems and their thorough understanding of the details of how to build interfaces.

IB MAGAZINE: What led Microsoft to iWay Software?

SWIFT: I knew John Senor, president of Information Builders’ iWay Software Division, from my previous positions, and I understood the depth of iWay’s offerings. When I came to Microsoft, one of the first phone calls I made was to Senor. We got together and began to see the opportunities for how iWay could add value to the BizTalk Server offering.

IB MAGAZINE: What strategic advantages do you see for end users when Microsoft and iWay team up together?

SWIFT: With iWay, we have a very broad range of connections to legacy systems. iWay acts as a bridge to Web services. When we go to customers, we’re able to talk about our vision of orchestrating Web services and about how customers don’t have to rip out and replace existing systems. All they have to do is simply wrap up those assets as Web services to take advantage of new XML and Web services-based applications and technologies.

IB MAGAZINE: How do you see BizTalk Server evolving over time?

SWIFT: As we move forward, we’re investing heavily in the concept of listening to our customers and their requests for what they want to see in the product.We’re looking at specific scenarios to make the application of the technology broader. We’re now finalizing plans for the product’s next generation roadmap. Because it isn’t finalized, I can’t say what we’re considering, but I can say it includes some of the most exciting things I’ve seen in the integration marketplace. This includes refinements in the areas of orchestration and in the integration of the development environment. We will move forward with a solid long-term strategy for enabling Web services.

IB MAGAZINE: When do you think you’ll be able to make those plans public?

SWIFT: Later this year we’ll be committing to the what and when.

Alan Joch is a freelance technology writer based in Francestown, NH.