News

Microsoft RFID tool cuts Rite Care fulfillment time in half

December 7, 2008

LAS VEGAS — At this week's Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit, Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability of BizTalk RFID Mobile and the BizTalk RFID Standards Pack, as well as the first public beta of BizTalk Server 2009 for download.

Together, these releases demonstrate Microsoft's continued commitment to the BizTalk Server product family, which helps enable customers to achieve enhanced end-to-end enterprise connectivity across the business and provides them with a clear, accurate view into their day-to-day operations.

BizTalk RFID Mobile, which is generally available today, extends the power of BizTalk Server RFID to mobile devices running Windows Mobile and Windows CE. In addition, BizTalk RFID Mobile delivers simple device management and offline processing capabilities, all of which help reduce the total cost of ownership.

Customers are already seeing benefits from deploying mobile radio frequency identification solutions on the new platform. Rite Care Pharmacy Inc., a growing retail chain and one of 8,200 BizTalk customers worldwide, worked with Microsoft partner S3Edge Software to cut its order fulfillment time and inventory space requirements in its warehouses in half.

"With BizTalk RFID Mobile, we can quickly decide where a product needs to go as soon as we receive it, removing several steps in the inventory stocking process," said Seshu Guddanti, managing director at Rite Care Pharmacy. "This helped us to reduce our turnaround time from four days to two days."

With the public beta release of BizTalk Server 2009, Microsoft is delivering the first customer preview of the multirelease road map announced in September 2008 and is giving customers the first look of the feature-complete download. BizTalk Server 2009 supports the latest Microsoft application platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. BizTalk Server 2009 also delivers expanded new connectivity options including new integration with Oracle Corp.'s E-Business Suite, as well as updated platform support for the most recent versions of IBM Corp.'s Customer Information Control System (CICS), Information Management System (IMS), DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database and WebSphere MQ.