Microsoft Customers and Technology Partners Rally to Support the Launch of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006
Early deployments by TD Canada Trust, WorkSafeBC, and Toronto.com reinforce enterprise readiness and business value of Microsoft-based application platform
MISSISSAUGA, ON - November 7, 2005 - Today, Microsoft Canada Co. announced the launch of SQL Server™ 2005 and Visual Studio® 2005 development system and the upcoming release of BizTalk® Server 2006. With these releases, Microsoft is delivering a broad family of software that offers unprecedented productivity to developers and organizations, while giving enterprise customers a scalable platform to help gain greater and faster insight into their business decisions.
“Microsoft’s customers demands are changing and there is an opportunity to deliver a platform that will better enable people to add more value, gain greater insight and play an even bigger role in the success of their organizations,” said David Hemler, president, Microsoft Canada Co. “Today’s launch delivers a set of new platform capabilities that offer an unprecedented level of integration between the server infrastructure and development tools. This ultimately gives customers the software to help make an impact on business results in a more tangible way.”
According to industry analyst firm IDC, the new software will help Canadian companies to reap better business value.
“The criterion that Canadian organizations cite as most important for the purchase of a database is the quality of the management tools. This is consistent with other IDC Canada findings that point to the importance of delivering greater productivity - the better the tools, the easier it is for tasks to be completed at a lower cost,” said David Senf, manager, Canadian Software Research at IDC Canada. “Together, SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 help address these key business needs.”
A New Era of Opportunity; Technology Partners and Customers See Immediate Results
Some of Canada’s premier companies, including TD Canada Trust, RBC, Toronto.com, Coast Mountain Bus and WorkSafeBC (the Workers' Compensation Board of B.C.), have leveraged the Microsoft-based application platform to achieve greater business value across their organizations.
“We’ve been very successful in delivering a variety of innovative solutions using the Microsoft-based development environment, from e-business applications to our wireless mobility solution,” said Brian Cooper, CIO, WorkSafeBC. “We were particularly interested in using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 on our WorkSafe Mobility project, as it will not just be a point solution for our prevention officers, but also a foundation for all of our mobile solutions over the next few years. As such, we wanted to use the latest tools that would give us the best productivity and functionality available.”
Microsoft technology partners such as HP, Squirrel Systems, imason and Active Networks have implemented SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 across a variety of vertical and horizontal industries. Customers can benefit from their deep knowledge of the platform and their ability to harness its capabilities to deliver enterprise-class solutions.
“These new products deliver more than just a platform any business can trust to build and run its most demanding, mission-critical applications. With SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, companies can take advantage of a rich set of new capabilities that will help the people within their organizations to better understand their business and drive for better bottom-line results,” said Scott Howlett, principal, imason inc.
New Capabilities Enable People to Make Better Decisions Faster
The advancements Microsoft is delivering with Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 build on the foundation put in place over the last several years with significant investments in Windows Server™ 2003 and Microsoft .NET, providing developers and IT professionals with a dependable application platform that has underlying support for Web services and service orientation capabilities. The deeper integration of the server and tools with today’s releases enables a host of innovative scenarios and range of new capabilities:
| • | Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 enable developers and development teams to build high-performance, security-enhanced and reliable solutions using an enterprise-ready development platform. Visual Studio 2005 features an expanded set of tools including Visual Studio Team System, an extensible life-cycle tools platform that enables collaboration among software development teams to deliver modern service-oriented solutions. |
| • | Microsoft SQL Server 2005 provides an integrated data management and analysis platform that helps organizations reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run complex business applications. With embedded reporting and data analysis tools included with SQL Server 2005, companies can gain greater insight from their business information. |
| • | BizTalk Server 2006 delivers new features that enable enterprises to better monitor, manage and deploy their mission-critical business processes. |
Microsoft Delivers Increased Value and Functionality with Expanded Product Line
As part of Microsoft’s new enterprise-focused tools, Visual Studio Team System is designed to address the growing complexity of the software development lifecycle. Because of the deep integration of Visual Studio Team System with SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, these products help break down the barriers between the architect, tester, developer and project manager to enable better collaboration across distributed environments and speed business-driven software delivery.
Furthering Microsoft’s move to more role specific software, the expanded set of product offerings was created to meet the unique requirements of audiences spanning hobbyists and students to enterprise architects. With Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, Microsoft provides easy to use database and development tools to hobbyists and students to construct Windows-based applications and Web sites for personal use and enjoyment.
To further assist hobbyists and enthusiasts, Microsoft today announced the immediate availability of the “Express Do-It-Yourself Kit,” a collection of award-winning artwork from Corbis, icons from the Microsoft icon gallery, templates, instructional videos, and other useful resources.
Industry Validation of Performance Gains
Microsoft also announced several new benchmark results that demonstrate the performance gains achieved with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. The validation from these benchmarks enables customers to better understand the real-world scenarios supported by these products:
| • | The platform for mission-critical applications. The latest SAP Sales and Distribution three-tier standard application benchmark, using SQL Server 2005 and Windows Server 2003 running on HP and Intel hardware, delivered record-breaking results with 93,000 concurrent users. This new 64-processor benchmark, certified on Nov 3, 2005, is 3.5 times more scalable than SQL Server 2000 and demonstrates SQL Server 2005’s enterprise-class abilities.* |
| • | Superior price/performance. Today, Microsoft, with industry partners AMD, Bull, HP, Intel, NEC and Unisys, announced several new TPC benchmarks running SQL Server 2005 that demonstrate its industry-leading value and performance. The benchmarks prove that Microsoft delivers record-breaking performance and price/performance on commodity hardware, plus scalability on high-end servers to handle enterprise-class requirements for OLTP and data warehousing. |
| • | Exploiting the benefits of integration. Validating the integration of SQL Server 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0, new benchmarks show the platform provides 183 percent better performance than equivalently coded EJB-applications running on IBM WebSphere 6.0 against and Oracle 10G backend. Further, price/performance tests demonstrate the .NET Framework running on Windows Server 2003 costs about half of IBM WebSphere running on RedHat Linux Advanced Server in test environments. |
| • | The power of 64-bit. The new CachePerf benchmark demonstrates the significant advantage the 64-bit architecture provides in terms of memory addressability and the specific midtier and data-tier scenarios where customers can look to 64-bit systems to significantly outperform 32-bit systems. |
Further information on the SQL Server 2005 benchmarks can be found at www.microsoft.com/sql/productinfo/compare/benchmarks.mspx. In addition, the .NET Framework 2.0 benchmarks may be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/java/compare.
Product Information, Pricing and Availability
Canadian pricing and licensing information for SQL Server, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 can be found at: www.microsoft.ca/bigdata. Subscribers to the Microsoft Developer Network and Microsoft TechNet are able to download these products immediately from their respective subscriber download centers.
* SAP certification number was not available at press time and can be found at the following Web page: www.sap.com/benchmark.
About Microsoft Canada
Established in 1985, Microsoft Canada Co. is the Canadian subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq "MSFT") the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft Canada provides nationwide sales, marketing, consulting and local support services in both French and English. Headquartered in Mississauga, Microsoft Canada has 10 regional offices across the country dedicated to empowering people through great software - any time, any place and on any device. Visit Microsoft Canada's Web site at www.microsoft.ca
© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft, SQL Server, Visual Studio and BizTalk are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
