REDMOND, Wash., May 9, 2002 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that EBSCO Industries Inc. has chosen to use Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2002 to build the B2B infrastructure for its subscription services business to further automate order processing and gain the ability to add new electronic business relationships more easily. EBSCO Subscription Services is a subscription provider of more than 282,000 journals, serving libraries and corporations worldwide from 31 regional offices in 19 countries.
EBSCO previously had worked with another integration vendor but realized it needed a solution that would support the latest industry standards, such as XML, and that would be able to scale to support future IT projects. EBSCO chose to work with Microsoft to create this new solution.
“From beginning to end, we have been very impressed with BizTalk Server 2002,”
said Terry Webster, Web development manager at EBSCO.
“The whole project took us only four weeks to complete, compared with the 26 weeks we had spent setting up the same project with a competing product. Plus, it was more cost-effective for us to redevelop our solution completely with BizTalk Server than to extend the license we had with the competitive application, so we are definitely saving ourselves money in the long run.”
In addition, EBSCO expects to find increased revenue using BizTalk Server. EBSCO plans to add its books catalog to its e-commerce marketplace, giving it yet another avenue to increase sales. BizTalk Server also has enabled EBSCO to completely automate order processing, which will drive down the cost of fulfillment by reducing human errors in processing.
EBSCO has plans for its B2B solution to eventually become a total Microsoft .NET solution. Presently, the solution is built on a number of Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, including BizTalk Server 2002, SQL Server™
2000 and Commerce Server 2000.
“EBSCO has been able to realize some significant benefits from switching to BizTalk Server,”
said Dave Wascha, lead product manager for BizTalk Server at Microsoft.
“The company had an impressive vision for where it wanted to take its B2B solution, and the solution is going to get more and more interesting and innovative as EBSCO moves toward .NET.”
Using XML, SOAP and other core Internet transports and protocols, BizTalk Server unites enterprise application integration, B2B and business process management technology in a single product to allow companies to easily orchestrate Web services and rapidly build dynamic business processes that span applications, platforms and businesses.
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