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Press Releases
CONTACT:
Jean Barnes
Covast Corporation
(404)812.7157
jbarnes@covast.com Microsoft Strengthens Relationship With Covast to Help Customers Surpass
EDI Challenge
Oldcastle Architectural Inc., a CRH plc Company, Turns to BizTalk Server and Covast EDI Accelerator for End-to-End B2B Solution REDMOND, Wash. - May 6, 2003 - Microsoft Corp. today announced that
it has signed an agreement that makes Covast a premier member of the BizTalk®
Server Partner Program. Covast provides the EDI Accelerator for BizTalk Server,
which enables complex electronic data interchange (EDI) support within Microsoft®
BizTalk Server. As part of the agreement, Microsoft plans to license portions
of the Covast EDI Accelerator in future e-business solutions, creating an enhanced
solution for business-to-business (B2B) communication.
Organizations are increasingly basing new integration projects on Extensible
Markup Language (XML), but want to preserve their existing trading communities
and business processes based on EDI. Oldcastle Architectural Inc., a leading
North American producer of concrete masonry, lawn, garden and paving products
as well as clay bricks, faced this situation when the company installed a new
enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and wanted to be able to easily move
customer information into and out of the system. It chose to use the combination
of Microsoft BizTalk Server and Covast EDI Accelerator to create an end-to-end
B2B solution.
"We needed flexibility to connect with customers using EDI and AS2, and
we needed to route that information using XML to our ERP system," said
Jerry Kottelenberg, CIO at Oldcastle. "We chose to use BizTalk Server along
with the Covast EDI Accelerator for our integration platform in order to achieve
this flexibility. This solution enables us to rapidly connect with our customers
and communicate in the manner that best suits the customer. Our results show
increased productivity due to the flexibility and end-to-end integration of
this Microsoft and Covast solution."
BizTalk Server Continues to Grow
One of the biggest challenges for enterprises today is creating a connected
business. Enterprises can address this challenge with Microsoft e-business server
products such as BizTalk Server. A single solution based on industry standards
such as XML and Simple Object Access Protocol, BizTalk Server integrates applications
and automates business processes. Having gained more than 2,200 customers in
just over two years, BizTalk Server is one of the fastest growing integration
servers on the market. This agreement with Covast highlights one more way that
BizTalk Server will enable customers to more easily connect to trading partners,
creating additional productivity and enabling them to attain a truly connected
business.
"Companies are constantly looking for more ways to ease the process of
connecting to their trading partners," said Eric Swift, group product manager
for E-Business Servers at Microsoft. "Because of Covast's expertise with
EDI, we chose to work with it on an enhanced solution that would help companies
solve the EDI challenge. This is great news for customers that have been looking
for a way to work with EDI without needing to buy a single-purpose EDI server."
Covast enables companies to easily integrate their EDI infrastructures with
internal applications and provides a gateway for connecting trading communities.
Covast is the recommended EDI solution for the BizTalk Server environment. More
information is available at http://www.covast.com/.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader
in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing.
The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower
people through great software - any time, any place and on any device.
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Microsoft and BizTalk are either registered trademarks or trademarks
of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks
of their respective owners.
For more information, press only:
Alexa Miller, Waggener Edstrom, (425) 638-7000, alexam@wagged.com
Rapid Response Team, Waggener Edstrom, (503) 443-7070, rrt@wagged.com
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