Announcing…another new ‘edition’ to the BizTalk family

Today at the RFID Journal Live conference in Las Vegas, we announced Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile -a light weight application that works on mobile RFID devices, and will enable delivery of relevant information from these devices to central business process systems. We'll deliver this to our customers at the end of the calendar year, 2008. We have a private beta running today.

When we look at the RFID market, it's truly an example of a technology that's ‘come of age'. Just a couple years back, RFID tags and mobile readers were too expensive to purchase and implement, making reasonable ROI out of reach for most customers. Today, tags cost just pennies, and mobile readers work well with central business process management systems, empowering peopleto make on-the-spot business decisions that can truly impact the bottom line. At the same time, this important information gets communicated back to the guys in the office to monitor trends and make adjustments-it's the type of capability most businesspeople have dreamed of-until now.

And none of this would have been possible without the ecosystem-partners across the industry have worked together to come up with standards, and to integrate mobile hardware with central infrastructure, tags and software alike. We're seeing results from this effort, and Microsoft is particularly happy to be working with several of our hardware partners on BizTalk RFID Mobile integration. Here's what a few of them had to say:

"BizTalk RFID Mobile represents an exciting opportunity for Motorola to build on our track record of delivering innovative products to meet customer needs," said Joe White, vp RFID business development, Motorola Enterprise Mobility.  "Motorola is actively partnering with Microsoft so that our customers will be able to reliably and seamlessly run applications on BizTalk RFID Mobile."

"As a committed leader in the application of mobile RFID, we believe that Microsoft's BizTalk RFID Mobile will help accelerate the adoption of RFID by easing integration," said Intermec Director of RFID Business Strategy, Chris Kelley.  "With the release of the Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile, Microsoft partners will have a unified interface to all Intermec mobile and fixed readers, as well as our RFID-enabled printers."

"We're committed to working with Microsoft towards the integration of our rugged mobile computing devices with Microsoft's innovative BizTalk RFID Mobile platform. Compatibility with Microsoft's BizTalk RFID platform will offer our customers an unprecedented ability to leverage RFID applications throughout their enterprise" said Aneline Ghita, RFID Project Manager, Global Solutions Group, Psion Teklogix.

"Samsung is excited to support BizTalk RFID Mobile and see this innovative product drive a evolution in the RFID market," said Chungkoo Yoon, Vice President Samsung.

"Visibility of edge process is critical business decision, we are glad to announce that unitech readers now support BizTalk Mobile. Microsoft is once again making it simple and easy to create solutions to empower the mobile worker to act on real world visibility. Together with Microsoft BizTalk & Unitech,  the industry now has a best-of-breed platform to build and deploy these real time solutions. And as a core partner of Microsoft BizTalk RFID, we are implementing Microsoft BizTalk RFID and Unitech RFID readers for Unitech RFID Reader Inventory & Shipping System." said Judy Huang, Global RFID Director of Unitech.