In UK we got a policy of shifting the bank holidays that comes in the middle of the week to following Monday, so people can have an extended weekend. Last year's 1st May bank holiday was shifted to 2nd May, on that day we released our very first version of BizTalk360 CTP to public. Today is 7th May, alternative to 2012's 1st May holiday.

We introduced BizTalk360 with a very powerful tag line "Worlds first BizTalk production support and monitoring tool". We clearly understood, being first doesn't mean anything (Google is not the first search engine, iPOD is not the first MP3 player and Windows is not the first GUI OS to give few examples). It's all about innovation and constant improvement that either makes or breaks the product.

In the following chart we summarize our improvement over the last 1 year. We release 4 major versions in the past 1 year. We simply didn't increase the version number for every simple updates, each version came with substantial functionality that ease the life of BizTalk administrators and support people in a day to day activity.

In the past 1 year we got customers over 10 countries, covering various industry sectors. Most of the customers are large scale enterprise customers, some of them are well known retail brands. Never thought the shirts I wear and the world famous trainers I use for my tennis (companies) will become my customers one day!!.

I whole heartedly thank every one who helped us to achieve this milestone. All my MVP and community friends, my close family and friends. We haven't paused yet, we already started planning for what's coming after 4.0 (keep tuned).

NOTE: BizTalk360 got it's own blog now, so if you want to keep up to date with product improvements, please subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Yesterday we announced the immediate availability of BizTalk360 V4.0, you can download it and start using it straight away from here http://www.biztalk360.com/Content/beta

Now BizTalk360 got it's own blog, please subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360 to get regular updates on our progress.

One of the major improvements we have made for BizTalk360 v4.0 is extending our monitoring capabilities.

In previous version, customers were able to monitor all the artifacts related to BizTalk Applications (send ports, receive locations, orchestrations, and host instances status) + they can set alerts based on Message box viewer report (when critical or non-critical errors above certain level). But with BizTalk360 v4.0, customers can monitor and get alerted in various areas as listed below

1. BizTalk Applications (simple)
2. BizTalk Applications (Advanced)

• Send Ports
• Receive Locations
• Orchestrations

• NT Services
• Disks
• Event Logs
• System Resources (CPU, Memory)

• SQL Jobs

• Host Instances
• Web Endpoints (WCF/SOAP services, HTTP endpoints)

6. Message Box Viewer

We have written a detailed blog post with lots of pictures showing various functionalities in detail in our new official BizTalk360 blog

http://blog.biztalk360.com/post/2012/05/04/BizTalk360-v40-Beta-Extended-Monitoring-Capabilities.aspx

Now BizTalk360 got it's own blog (http://blog.biztalk360.com/), please subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360 to get regular updates on our progress.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

We are very pleased and excited (as always) to announce the immediate availability of BizTalk360 version 4.0 beta. You can download it from here http://www.biztalk360.com/content/beta

The core focus for 4.0 is enhancing the monitoring capabilities of BizTalk360 to infrastructure related things. As a bonus we also included the ability to maintain/execute custom SQL queries within BizTalk360. In this article, we will see the capabilities of Custom SQL Queries and in the next post I'll cover the monitoring enhancements

Custom SQL Queries:

When you are actively managing a BizTalk environment, the BizTalk admin and support people typically maintain a bunch of custom SQL queries as their armour to check the health of the system. You can see some of the good resources here for useful BizTalk SQL Queries biztalkadmin, biztalkadminsblogging,  technet. At the moment there is no easy way to maintain those queries, and you always need to access SQL management studio to execute them, and more than that you need to provide permission for users to execute those queries across various SQL instances and databases. We wanted to make this task easy for BizTalk admins and support people using BizTalk360.

We added a new link to our data section called "Custom SQL Queries" in our navigation tree, as shown in the below picture.

Once the user click on the link, "Custom SQL Queries - Report" screen will be displayed. The screen contains a combo box with list of pre-defined SQL queries as shown below. The user (BizTalk360 admin user) will have the ability to add new SQL query, or modify/delete existing queries.

The user simply select the query from the combo box and the result will be displayed in the grid below. Example: In the below screen user selected the query "Sendports NOT Started", which brings all the send ports in the environment that are not in started state, as shown below.

Custom SQL Query management:

BizTalk360 comes with set of inbuilt SQL queries, we are planning to add more queries to the default install over the future releases. BizTalk360 comes with complete query management capabilities. As shown in the below window, BizTalk360 administrators can add new query, modify/delete existing query, using this simple screen.

Benefits of Custom SQL query functionality:

There are few great advantages of this functionality. 

1. User can execute the query from single management tool. No necessity for SQL server management studio

2. Central Query repository, that makes maintaining queries easier. No more SharePoint or Wiki

3. The end users (support people) don't need to have access to SQL. The queries will be executed in the context of service account, so only the service account requires access.

4. You can include queries against any SQL instance/Database. As long as the service account got access to them.

In the next article we'll cover the big functionality of BizTalk360 v4.0, extended infrastructure monitoring capabilities.

Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Founder - BizTalk360

Finally we managed to secure our next user group meeting on 10th May 2012. We settled for the theme BizTalk Administration Special. In recent month, there are whole lot of traction around BizTalk administration and operations. Guys at BizTalk Administration Blogging (http://biztalkadminsblogging.com/) are doing a great job in promoting the importance of a BizTalk administrators role in an organisation.

Event Information:

When: 10th May 2012, Thursday, between 6:30 to 9:30pm

Where:  Customer Meeting Room 05
Microsoft, Cardinal Place
London

Registration Link: http://ukcsugmay2012-eorg.eventbrite.com/

Let me introduce Tord Glad Nordahl. Tord is from Norway, working for Bouvet ASA. He is establishing himself as an expert in BizTalk administration area. He is conducting the famous BizTalk Deep Dive course across the world. He got a dedicated blog for BizTalk Administration at http://biztalkadmin.com I met him few months ago in Netherlands during a user group presentation. We bounced back and forth few emails and he kindly accepted to come and present in London.

We are going to have 2 sessions focused on BizTalk administrations. First Tord is going to focus on insisting developers should keep BizTalk Administration in mind while building solutions. Next I'm going to present BizTalk360 (http://www.biztalk360.com ) and show how it can improve the efficiency of administration, operations and monitoring side of BizTalk environment. Both the sessions will complement each other.

London user group is special for us, this is where we announced for the first time in public about BizTalk360 exactly a year ago (http://ukcsbugmay2011.eventbrite.com/). It's one year on, with 3 major releases (v1.0, v2.5, v3.2) and the fourth one coming end of May.

Please register for the event if you are in/around London. We guarantee it will be worth while of your time.

We released version 3.2 of BizTalk360 on 7th of February with bunch of interesting features. Straight after that we merged ourselves on the our 4.0 version which is due to be released end of May.

Live Web Cast : 18th April 2012. Details and registration can be found here.

The main focus for 4.0 version is to expand BizTalk360 existing monitoring capabilities to other core infrastructure related areas like disk space, NT services running state, SQL jobs running state, system resources like CPU, Memory, Event Log patterns etc.

The other important thing we included in 4.0 is a plug-in architecture, monitoring sections can be written in isolation and can be plugged-in into BizTalk360 core monitoring system. These is super useful for customer who got very specific monitoring requirements. Example: One of customers want to do some sequence of steps,

1. Get a value of the element in the config file using xpath,
2. Check the database for some relevant value based on the previous config file value.
3. Alert if the database value is not expected value.

In the past BizTalk customers always got some custom in-house solution to do these kind of things. But now you can easily create such custom monitoring in BizTalk360 and make it part of your overall monitoring solution.

Why not SCOM Monitoring?

There is no question an enterprise monitoring solution like System Center operation manager(SCOM), HPOpenview or something equivalent can do these kind of jobs, but there are some real practical challenges.

1. They are complex products in themselves, and requires considerable knowledge to set it up

2. They are general purpose monitoring products and they look heavy and complicated for some of the basic scenarios

3. It's often time consuming to setup SCOM or HPOpenview in an organisation, which could range from weeks to months.

With BizTalk360 our focus is to to concentrate only on Microsoft BizTalk Server related areas. We try to keep it as simple as possible. Our focus is to setup BizTalk environment monitoring in few minutes or hours, NOT days, weeks or months.

Come and join our BizTalk360 Live Webcast on 18th April 2012, and check for yourself what we have to offer. We are doing two session on the same day to cover east and west time zones. The details of the event and registration can be done here.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Software pricing is always tricky, it's all about how much someone is willing to pay for your product rather than what it cost to produce and support. Most of the time it's either rolling the dice or finger in the air estimate. 

At BizTalk360 we didn't quite do it that way, instead we conducted a survey with around 200 people in the BizTalk area giving them 3 simple choices (Free, $1-$5k, $5 -$10k and over $10). Majority of them suggested between $5-$10k and we opted for our current pricing model with some more thoughts on standard and enterprise BizTalk editions.

At that time we quite didn't understand the whole enterprise software business, challenges around and real hurdles. Now after dealing with customers across the world we know exactly how the model works.

Changing the pricing could have serious impact on the product, hence we want to engage with the community and get your thoughts. I'll present the list of challenges we are facing

1. Closing a deal takes a long period.

BizTalk360 is an enterprise product, it's not mobile app where people see it - buy it instantaneously. They download the BizTalk360 trial to do their due diligence, lots and lots of email communications (over 50 emails is very common). May be 5-10 phone calls, May be 1 or 2 live demos, in some case it's client site visit and POC.

At an average we spend easily 10-20 hours over a period of 4 to 10 weeks before we can on-board a customer. That's lot of hours. We are happy to answer all those question, but I guess that should reflect on the price.

2. Commercial side paper work, legal charges and insurance cost

Once we cross the technical challenges boundary and they are convinced with the product, the commercial teams will get in touch with us with set of paper work. Typically a NDA, Confidentiality, Eval Terms Agreement, Vendor registration, W9 Tax stuff, Vendor license agreement etc. You just can't simply glance through it and sign it, it may have some nasty surprises in small print some where hidden deep inside, one such example

"Supplier shall pay any and all damages, awards, fees, costs, and expenses associated therewith, including without limitation, any amounts paid in settlement thereof and reasonable attorneys fees."

So, we reached a stage where we can't just do it ourselves and we need to involve legal teams. It's not a surprise to anyone, involving a legal person is not cheap.

In addition to legal fees, this also brings us to a new set of expenses called "Product liability insurance" and they are not cheap.

3. Reseller commission

Lot of the organisations won't purchase the software directly for various reasons (paper work as explained in the previous block is an example). The software will be purchased through a reseller. I don't need to explain the nature of the whole middle man business whether you are buying a house or looking for your pension.  They need a slice, possibly from both sides. But they definitely ask us, anywhere in the region of 5-10%

4. Having a fair price, sometimes make the product look cheap

This is a funny one, the perception is still there. If you software is not 10's of thousands of $$$ people assume it's not going to do it's job properly. We priced BizTalk360 very, very fairly. Our objective was to build something that's super useful and provide it to wide audience with a fair price, just making sure we can make a living out of it. Recently we had a customer visit, huge BizTalk implementation, 6 servers, with 24 BizTalk licenses. Approximately over $500k just on licensing cost for the environment and when we quote around $5k for our software for that environment, it just make them wonder "does it actually work!!". I just want to assure everyone who got this doubt in mind, we put incredible amount of effort to build BizTalk360 to enterprise quality. We are not Jo bloke's, we got incredible track record in what we are doing.

5. Partner commission

For us this is ok, because we sign up partners agreeing terms and conditions upfront, they bring us business and we are happy to provide them their share. But need to keep this in mind when it comes to pricing our product.

6. Exchange rates and Bank commissions

We are based in UK, ? is not treated as international currency. Software products are normally traded in USD ($) especially if you are targeting global market. That brings another expense to your enterprise software i.e the money lost in bank exchange rates and bank commissions. If the customer does a bank wire transfer, the fees will be around 1 to 1.5%, if you are processing via online payment gateway like PayPal or some other internet merchant accounts, then it will range anywhere between 2.5 to 5%

 7. BizTalk360 has grown significantly

The current pricing was published all most a year ago with Version 1.0 of the product. Now BizTalk360 is in version 3.2 (2.5, 3.2), with each version we brought really exciting features. The more features we add, it means more areas to maintain and support.

We need your input

As I mentioned pricing a software is tricky and changing the pricing is even more tricky, we need your thoughts and input how we should do it

1. Is $5299 for whole BizTalk environment in spite of the number of servers/CPU's still a fair price

2. Is $1324 for whole test environment fair price?

3. Is changing the pricing going to upset people?

Note: We are very happy with Standard license cost for BizTalk server standard users at $1324, given they are only going to pay around $10k for their BizTalk license.

Please respond back with your comments, or if you want to respond privately please drop us a line at contact(at)biztalk360.com

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Here I'm writing this post from my hotel in Bellevue, I'm here to attend the MVP Global Summit 2012. It's one of the very important event for us from BizTalk360. Anniversary of BizTalk360 is inline with the MVP summit. The initial idea of BizTalk360 was originated from 2010 summit while having dinner with some of the great BizTalk MVP folks in Redmond.  The original idea was to build some web based administration console for BizTalk server.  Like any typical chit-chat over coffee, after the summit everyone went on their own way and nothing materialised.

Couple months after the summit I started to work on the idea, initially no big plans just to play with some latest and greatest technologies like WCF and SilverLight. Slowly the idea turned into something that will be useful to lot of people and I started paying more attention, hired few contractors and completed version 1.0. I demonstrated the V1 product to Yossi Dahan and Michael Stephenson just before Christmas of 2010 (2 months before the 2011 summit). Got some great feedbacks from them, which  helped to refine the product.

In 2011 MVP summit I demoed the nearly completed V1 product to the whole BizTalk MVP community and to some folks in the BizTalk product team, again got some great feedbacks on the things that are must have in the V1 of the product. After coming back refined the product further, with constant feedback from the close friends in the BizTalk MVP community and launched the first public CTP version on May 2011.  The product finally launched in July 2011 and we sold our first commercial license in August 2011.

BizTalk360 is not just a web based BizTalk administration console anymore, we passed that stage almost a year ago. Now it cover wide range of things that's required for running your BizTalk environment efficiently like finer authorization capabilities, message box viewer integration, in-built monitoring, knowledge base repository, graphical message flow viewer, throttling analyser and many more

We released 3 major updates since our launch 8 months ago. We are very proud to say we got customers in several countries now. BizTalk360 is constantly evolving, we got big plans for our next release around June 2012. Stay tuned.

If you are in the summit, and want to have a chat please feel free to grab me any time.

Nandri,

Saravana Kumar,
Founder, BizTalk360

One of the big feature we added in our 3.2 release is the graphical message flow viewer. Basically it allows user to visualize the end-to-end message flow within your BizTalk Environment. A example screen shot

We released a short video  (7 minutes) this morning covering some of the scenarios and showing how easy it's to use it. If in case you are not aware, graphical message flow viewer requires zero development/configuration effort, you can install BizTalk360 on your existing environment and start using it straight away.

Watch the video:

https://vimeo.com/36884124

Nandri
Saravana Kumar

With our 3.2 release we restructured the navigation menu to make it bit more simpler. The LHS shows the old navigation and the RHS showing the new navigation (Data folder).

In the above screens, Chrome and IE are actually accessing the same resource (URL). IE is smart enough to refresh the new Silverlight XAP files and display the new navigation tree, whereas Chrome is still referring to the old xap file.

The solution to this problem is to clear the browser cache, you can follow the below instructions.

Go to Options>Under the Bonnet> Clear Browsing Data, which will bring the following screen

Just select "Empty the cache" option and click "Clear browsing data". After that you open a new instance of Chrome and navigate to BizTalk360 as normal. You can notice it's displaying the new navigation now.

There are few ways to tackle this problem permanently, we'll do a small incremental release to address this problem soon.

Regards,

Saravana Kumar

Follow us on twitter @biztalk360, to get this sort of updates quickly

We have done consulting work for various organisation, typically the BizTalk environment topology diagram is drawn in Visio and stored somewhere in document a repository like SharePoint. Depending on the size of the organisation, there will be various environments like SIT, UAT, Staging, Performance, Production, etc and it will be a time consuming task to keep the diagrams up to date. Majority of the time the diagrams will quickly go out of sync when more servers are added/removed to the environment, not representing the real topology.

BizTalk360, solves this problem by intelligently generating the topology diagram on the fly. This solves few issues

• You don't need to spend time generating topology diagrams in Visio.
• Your diagram is always in Sync with the real environment, since it's generated based on the current configuration.
• The diagram is readily available on the tool you use to support, so you don't need to hunt for them in your document repository.
• Diagram got inbuilt zoom-in/zoom-out capability if your environment is complex (ex: 6 BizTalk server , 4 SQL Servers)

Sample Single-Server diagram