Wow. I have a little flurry of blog posts coming. This one’s first because this is breaking news.

Microsoft is participating at the Sibos 2009 conference in Hong Kong this week (http://www.microsoft.com/industry/financialservices/events/sibos.mspx). Sibos is the financial industry’s premier global financial services forum. What’s exciting to me about this is that this is the first public announcement, I think, of the Financial Messaging Service Bus (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Microsoft-Announces-prnews-675925966.html?x=0&.v=1&.pf=taxes&mod=pf-taxes).

To quote from that post: “The Financial Messaging Service Bus cuts the cost of development, and speeds up the implementation process by providing reusable service-oriented architecture (SOA) components to simplify financial messaging integration”

From an implementation standpoint, this is a convergence of BizTalk Server 2009, ESB Toolkit 2.0 and the SWIFT support you get with BizTalk, along the way leveraging Business Activity Monitoring, the Business Rules Engine, and other parts of the stack. I had the opportunity to get an early look at some of this work, and I can tell you that it’s VERY impressive.

If you’re doing financial messaging, or working with clients that are, this is something you want to keep on your radar. I know I will be.