News

BizTalk Server 2013 May Arrive April with New Licensing Model

• By Kurt Mackie
• March 15, 2013

A Microsoft partner is reporting that BizTalk Server 2013 will be released next month with a new per-core licensing model.

Warsaw, Poland-based Multishoring.info predicts an April 1 release of BizTalk Server 2013, accompanied by a switch to a per-core licensing model, instead of the earlier per-processor one. Multishoring.info specializes in providing IT outsourcing services to organizations in Europe by serving up resources from "lower cost" countries, specifically Poland.

Multishoring.info expects that there will be no price increase for BizTalk Server 2013 compared with BizTalk Server 2010. The one exception is cases where an organization plans to install BizTalk on hardware with more than four cores.

The expected pricing for BizTalk Server 2013 Standard and Enterprise is listed in a Multishoring.info press release, although it's listed in British pounds. The company states that Microsoft's rules for converting BizTalk licenses will follow the same model as that associated with SQL Server 2012.

Rob Horwitz, research chair at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash.-based independent consultancy, suggested that Microsoft might just use its SQL Server 2012 core licensing model and rules because BizTalk is more of a "niche product." If so, the processor-to-core conversion rules for BizTalk Server 2013 with Software Assurance (SA) would be similar to that of SQL Server 2012.

Horwitz suggested that organizations could get strategic about when to buy BizTalk Server if they have hardware with eight cores per processor or more.

"Buying the current 2010 version with Software Assurance before 2013 ships would be a way to get the rights to run BizTalk Server 2013 on a processor with more than four processors, for the price of four procs," Horwitz said via e-mail. "But then there is the extra cost of SA to factor in....so it's probably an option worth consideration only if the hardware you have has eight cores per proc or greater."

Microsoft has stayed fairly quiet about BizTalk Server 2013 since it announced a beta in November. The product has slipped from earlier announced release cycles in the past. A spokesperson for Microsoft had no information to share at press time and did not confirm the supposed April 1 general availability date, nor the change to per-core licensing. It's possible that BizTalk Server 2013 will just make the April price list, with product availability happening later.

Microsoft has indicated that BizTalk 2013 would be available as an on-premises server product, as well as a service hosted in Windows Azure. The product, when released, will be capable of working with Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012, as well as new IBM systems. Microsoft will sell a Standard edition and Enterprise edition of BizTalk Server 2013, with "unlimited virtualization" rights only available via the Enterprise edition with SA.