Microsoft .NET Fuels Industry Adoption of XML Web Services

NEW ORLEANS, April 10, 2002 — Today at Microsoft Tech
·Ed, Microsoft Corp. made a series of announcements underscoring its commitment to XML Web services and highlighting strong momentum within the Microsoft® .NET industry ecosystem. During his keynote speech, Eric Rudder, senior vice president of the Developer Platform and Evangelism Group at Microsoft, announced that Visual Studio®
.NET and the .NET Framework crossed the 1 million units shipped mark since their launch in February. Rudder also unveiled a broad array of customers and industry partners supporting the .NET Platform, Microsoft’s first commercially available XML Web service, and support for XML Web services in several key Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server products. Today’s announcements emphasize the pervasiveness of XML Web services throughout the .NET Platform, the vital role they are playing in the larger industry, and how Microsoft is helping its customers embrace this architecture.

“We devoted four years and allocated millions of hours of product development to present developers with the premier tools and platform in Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework,” Rudder said. “Today we’re rolling out the next phase of the phenomenon — core standards support and rich toolkits for every product in the .NET Enterprise Server line — allowing customers to maximize their technology investments and transform their businesses through XML Web services.”

XML Web Services Driving Real-World Value

Rudder highlighted several customers that are deriving business value from .NET today, including Citigroup, Ingram Micro Inc., Marks & Spencer, Northrop Grumman Newport News and Pacific Life Insurance Co. Paul Galant, global head of e-commerce and market data strategy for Citigroup’s corporate and investment bank, joined Rudder onstage to demonstrate a prototype of an application currently in development that is expected to have a positive impact on several Citigroup businesses.

“Citigroup is constantly evaluating new ways to use technology to increase the relevance and value of the information that our bankers and customers receive from our systems, analytics, research and the marketplace,” Galant said. “XML Web services built on the Microsoft .NET Platform, ASP.NET and Visual C# (TM) have helped us architect a flexible framework asset that interoperates with Citigroup’s many back-end systems and information suppliers, and that we believe will give our global banking teams a competitive edge across a wide spectrum of relationship issues, services and products.”

Many customers are realizing significant business value, productivity gains and return on investment (ROI) with .NET:

  • Ingram Micro lowered development time of its e-commerce storefront solution by 45 percent with .NET and XML Web services.

  • Marks & Spencer reported that its fraud detection application built on .NET lowered time and resources by 66 percent and that the company has received a 415 percent ROI in the application’s first year.

  • Northrop Grumman Newport News accelerated time to market by 19 percent using the .NET Platform for its ShipRepair for .NET application.

  • Pacific Life rolled out its policyholders Web site in just weeks — including taking advantage of a $3.5 million investment in Visual Basic®
    code.

Rudder summed up partner support for the Microsoft .NET Platform by introducing new industry partners that are embracing the .NET solution, including Akamai, Altova Inc., Exodus, FrontRange Solutions Inc., Fujitsu, McAfee.com, O’Reilly and Symantec Corp. For example, Akamai introduced EdgeSuite for Microsoft .NET, a service using .NET technologies to deliver XML Web services at the edge of the Akamai network, and showcased its service’s first pilot customer, McAfee.com. In addition, Exodus announced plans to build a globally distributed application platform that will provide its customers with the infrastructure and management services they need to build, test, deploy and monitor Web services built on Microsoft .NET. Patrick Bultema, president and CEO of FrontRange, the maker of GoldMine and HEAT, joined Rudder onstage to demonstrate FrontRange’s .NET-based customer relationship management (CRM) application.

Microsoft also announced the commercial availability of the Microsoft MapPoint®
.NET programmable XML Web service, which enables developers to include location components in applications and services quickly and easily. The MapPoint .NET XML Web service represents a milestone for the .NET Platform and XML Web services in general, because it is Microsoft’s first commercially available XML Web service built exclusively on .NET technology.

Core XML Web Services Support Throughout .NET Platform

Building on yesterday’s Commerce Server 2002 launch, Microsoft unveiled the latest product deliverables that extend XML Web services support throughout the line of .NET Enterprise Servers.

  • Availability of the Exchange 2000 Server XML Web Services Toolkit for Microsoft .NET. This includes tools and resources to bring contextual collaboration to .NET-based applications using Exchange 2000 and XML Web services.

  • Availability of SQL Server (TM) 2000 Notification Services beta. Notification Services is the premier platform for developing and deploying rich and highly scalable notification applications. Building on the key capabilities of the .NET Framework and the scalability of SQL Server Notification Services provides an easy-to-use programming model and a highly scalable server engine for generating and formatting notifications based on personal subscriptions.

  • Availability of Microsoft SQL Server Windows
    ®

    CE Edition (SSCE) 2.0 beta.
    SQL Server CE is the compact database for rapidly developing applications that extend enterprise data management capabilities to devices. Version 2.0 integrates with the .NET Compact Framework through the Visual Studio .NET Smart Device Extensions.

Ensuring a Successful Transition to .NET

Rudder called attention to Microsoft’s commitment to helping customers take full advantage of the .NET platform, including unveiling an extended Visual Basic support policy. He also reiterated and pointed to a variety of current support options that enable developers to increase their skills in the manner they choose.

A host of partners emphasized this commitment to upgrading to the .NET platform, with more than 200 integrated add-on tools being developed by component vendors and Visual Studio .NET Integration Program (VSIP) partners, including a number of partners that are announcing the shipment of products today. In addition, consultants, trainers, book publishers, authors and third-party Web site owners are helping developers and companies successfully transition to .NET by authoring 275 books, delivering quality .NET training, and providing other technical resources and discussion forums. In addition, to meet developer demand for high-quality .NET information and training, Microsoft is launching the .NET Code Wise Community program to educate and mobilize community experts and help them reach more developers.

“The upgrade to Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework is the best upgrade ever, and we’re committed to making sure every customer is successful in their transition,” Rudder said. “We’ll stand by customers every step of the way by supporting pervasive XML Web services standards, offering training courses and tutorials, providing full product support and upgrade tools and wizards, security features, code samples and much more. Customers have a wide and predictable path to .NET.”

About Microsoft Tech
·
Ed 2002

One of Microsoft’s premier annual developer training events, Tech
·
Ed reaches more than 75,000 people worldwide. It provides attendees with access to technical experts, the latest technical information and hands-on labs to learn the skills they need to build state-of-the-art solutions. Sponsors of Tech
·
Ed 2002 include Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., IBM Corp., Intel Corp., NetIQ Corp., Rational Software Corp. and VERITAS Software Corp.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.

Microsoft, Visual Studio, Visual C#, Visual Basic, MapPoint and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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