Microsoft to Host First-Ever Business Applications Conference

Redmond, Wash., July 14, 1998 — Your eCommerce strategy might keep you ahead of the curve. Your customer management application might keep you in tune. Your e-mail system might keep you communicating. But that might not be enough to keep you on top.

Successful companies will be the ones that tightly integrate applications throughout their businesses in a way that helps them quickly disseminate information and swiftly respond to customer needs. Success, in other words, might lie in how your applications are wired together.

And that’s why Microsoft has decided to stage – for the first time – a conference devoted entirely to teaching developers how to integrate applications. At the Business Applications Conference ’98, September 9-11 in Las Vegas, numerous corporate developers, systems integrators and independent software vendors will learn how to create business solutions by wiring applications together. The conference is organized around five tracks, each covering a different type of application: Line of Business; eCommerce; Collaboration; Tracking; and Business Intelligence. Companies involved in the conference include SAP, FedEx, Baan, IBM, Platinum, Wall Data and Ernst & Young.

“Developers have told us that they want to learn more than how to simply use individual Microsoft technologies,” said James Utzschneider, director of evangelism for Microsoft’s Application Developers Customer Unit. “They want to learn how to combine multiple Microsoft technologies, partner products, and existing UNIX and mainframe apps into solutions. We’ll provide some practical examples on how to best do that.”

The conference will put Microsoft on stage with customers, systems integrators and other software companies. “That’s the cool thing about this,” Utzschneider added. “Together, we’ll be demonstrating best practices of how to build applications that are plugged together from different parts. This is critical, because businesses are realizing that no app is an island.”

An end-to-end solution will be developed for each track using multiple ISV products and Microsoft technologies. Technical experts from Microsoft, partner software companies and customers will lead attendees through a two-day tutorial of the sample application, covering architecture, development, code reviews, scaling, interoperability, testing and deployment. Basically, attendees will learn how the app was built, then spend hours deconstructing it. By conference end, each attendee will walk away with intimate knowledge about the creation and workings of the solution – but also something more tangible: the complete solution on CD, including source code and documentation.

When it’s all over, developers will walk away with real answers,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft executive vice president for sales and support, who will deliver the closing keynote on Friday, Sept. 11, along with a grand-scale demonstration of the applications. “This is a way to put it all together to create solutions to real business problems for use in the real world.”

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