Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council in the United Kingdom wanted to reduce costs and improve public service delivery by offering more services electronically and by streamlining business processes. As a national leader in local government information and communications technology (ICT), the council entered a joint venture partnership with BT—called RBT—to drive forward its modernisation agenda. As part of the programme to improve the collection of revenues and administration of benefits, the council decided to deploy an enterprise service bus (ESB) offering. It also used the Microsoft® Application Platform with Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006 as the orchestration layer. As a result, the council is handling citizens’ requests for service—such as changes in payment methods for council tax—in seconds rather than days.

Global insurance and banking company Skandia collaborated with Microsoft on a project to upgrade its online banking services with Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 R2. Thanks to the collaboration, which included attendance at a three-week Performance and Stability Lab, Skandia has found the right environment to improve Web performance significantly. The Internet bank also predicts it can serve more than 1 million clients a day with the solution.

The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) provides a range of health services to the citizens of Arizona. When the federal government required that all state health departments facilitate interoperable information exchange between public health partners, ADHS adopted the Partner Healthcare Electronic Data EXchange (PHEDEX), a data integration solution powered by Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 R2, from The Simi Group. With its new solution, ADHS was able to quickly comply with federal regulations, eliminate paper from its lab reporting process, increase the quality of data reported, and increase public safety. By eliminating manual data entry, ADHS staff members are more productive and efficient, and can focus on quality data analysis. The department saved an estimated U.S.$2 million and years of development time by acquiring a commercial solution instead of building its own.

Tallard Technologies distributes high-tech products to Latin American resellers. But the sales and inventory transactions it conducted with its largest customer weren’t very high-tech. When the customer asked Tallard to adopt an Electronic Data Interchange solution, the company optimized its existing SAP application platform by implementing a service-oriented architecture with Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 R2 at its core. The result handles sales and inventory information and transactions faster than before, while requiring one-third of the previous staff. Tallard’s return on investment continues to climb as it makes new use not only of its SAP system, but also of the EDI code to expand the solution to additional countries and services, such as warranty returns. Best of all, the solution boosts customer satisfaction—and drives a closer relationship between Tallard and its customer.

The Entertainment and Devices Division (EDD) at Microsoft needed real-time insight into its supply chain to meet production deadlines. It wanted to better support business processes, but its highly distributed, cross-organizational infrastructure limited visibility. To improve efficiency, the EDD implemented a solution based on Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 with Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for RosettaNet. It upgraded to BizTalk Server 2006 R2, and then deployed BizTalk Server 2009 to take advantage of support for Hyper-V™ technology and connect applications in a virtualized server environment. Benefits include better business agility and productivity. For example, with virtualization the division can deploy a new line-of-business solution in two weeks instead of several months. Also, it can use service-oriented architecture to build new solutions from existing applications.

Sempra Energy Solutions (SES) is a top energy retailer in the United States. SES wanted a solution to help it connect its core business processes and better manage its enterprise application development. The company chose Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2009 as its integration solution because of its built-in Business Rules Engine, support for service-oriented architecture, and standardized administrative console. Now SES can develop more robust, maintainable solutions, and developers have shortened business rules development time by 87 percent. Support for Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server helps developers work collaboratively and gives them consistent tools for developing, tracking, and deploying BizTalk Server 2009 applications.

With 193 member nations, and programs worldwide, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is a broad and diverse organization with a complex and disparate IT environment. Solutions are deployed locally, without regard to ease of use, security rules, or access management at the international level. Implementing an enterprise resource planning solution revealed this lack of global management planning and led the organization to homogenize its IT system using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006, and other Microsoft technologies. Now UNESCO is developing a solution that will unify its global IT environment while integrating with its SAP management system and allowing the implementation of new applications as necessary.

Turkey-based DenizBank realised the evolution of Web technologies presented both challenges and opportunities. The key challenge was to develop a robust infrastructure that could support all banking services reliably. The organisation required a fully integrated environment delivering customer relationship management, business process management, and a business intelligence layer to maximise efficiency and service quality. DenizBank worked with solution provider Intertech to build the inter-Next infrastructure, which uses Microsoft® technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software and Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006. Today, customer satisfaction rates are high and the system can process a year’s worth of transactions in eight hours. After logging on once, personnel can access all applications on the network.

When the Belgian UNILIN was taken over by the American holding Mohawk Industries in 2005, it became necessary to integrate the many heterogeneous IT systems of all business units into a new, service oriented structure (SOA), and automate all business processes. Mohawk also sought software to centrally monitor all automated processes in order to quicker react to changes in the market. In order to realize this in practice, Mohawk Industries opted for Microsoft BizTalk Server, in combination with the .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Together with integration expert CODit, the Belgian team of UNILIN formed the worldwide SOA/BPM competence centre and created a united Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 as the engine.

A-dec, a leading manufacturer of dental equipment and furniture, wanted to automate its cabinetry-sales quoting process. For each order, employees made technical drawings so that customers could see what they were buying. This process took up to three days and impeded quality control. Also, the company’s ordering system didn’t provide employees with usable sales and business-process data. With help from EMC Consulting, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, A-dec deployed a service-oriented architecture solution based on Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006 R2, part of the Microsoft application platform. Now, sales quotes complete with three-dimensional drawings are generated automatically, usually in less than two hours; quality control is automated; and business users have tools for monitoring and managing the system. As a result, A-dec has increased sales and gained a competitive advantage.