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Booming BizTalk Competency

The Microsoft Partner Program competency for BizTalk Server, called Business Process & Integration, is signing up partners left and right. According to Burley Kawasaki, group product manager for BizTalk Server Product Management, the number of partners who have achieved the competency increased by 1,041 percent in a year. Last July, there were 124 firms with the competency. This July, there are 1,415.

Kawasaki attributes much of the growth to the marketing bounce BizTalk got as a result of its co-launch with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. He also says more local systems integrators are going through the competency process.

An R2 version of BizTalk Server 2006 is slated for the first half of 2007.

Posted by Scott Bekker on July 13, 2006


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