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For those who aren't old enough to remember – at one time Sybase was consider the best database software on the market. For professional usage you would consider either Sybase or Oracle, but Sybase had the edge.
Then Sybase partnered with Microsoft on a joint development project which became Microsoft SQL Server. Sybase was left for dead and disappeared to near oblivion from the top spot over the next few years.
Well, for a few releases of Biztalk, Covast has been the default 3rd party softwere to fill in the gaps needed to use Biztalk for traditional EDI (X12 and Edifact). Now just after Covast has delivered a solution for Biztalk 2006 we now see a BT2006 R2 coming that looks like it adds most of the features of Covast to the stock Biztalk product. Notably the batching solution looks remarkably similar to what Covast had for the 2006 release. Also note that the AS2 adaptor that Covast use to provide is now also being offered by Microsoft. ALso the main thing – the schemas, are mostly given away by Microsoft and they even have an EDI rule validation capability.
So is Covast the next Sybase, left for dead after Microsoft has appropriated anything of value from them?
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Good points. And I think the short answer is yes. But from what I’ve heard, EDI support will now be included in the cost of BizTalk resulting in end users no longer having to purchase additional software.
Plus it will result in a single support chain for issue resolution. All in all I think it is a good move for the end users.
Just my view on this.
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Not the "official" Microsoft position or anything, but I see this as a natural progression. What did our customers tell us? More in the box please. So, we went out and bought the adapter IP from iWay and included that with BizTalk 2006. Our customers asked for a better integrated EDI story, so we wrote a homegrown EDI stack that comes free in R2. Covast still has a play and will offer premium services.
One could argue that if you're a Microsoft ISV partner, that your choice is to continue innovating or run the risk of Microsoft absorbing that once-ISV capability into the product stack. K2.net is an example of a ISV who DOES stay ahead of the curve. ISVs fill a space when there is a gap in our stack. It's logical to figure that if a particular gap is a large enough customer pain point, that we'll go ahead and fill it ourselves eventually.
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Richard, I am looking at this relative to product selection from the perspective of a long time EDI professional.
A few months ago the release of BT2006 was touted in a press release along with the delivery of the Covast EDI solution for 2006. We were led to believe this was the next generation of the product. We started working with it.
Now, three months after that Microsoft comes along and says "we copied nearly all of the functionality of Covast and we are now giving it away for free"
Here are the reasons this gives me pause to consider this as a viable product to offer to clients.
1. It demonstrates bad faith towards partners. Covast clearly didn't going into this expecting to get stabbed in the back three months later.
2. It demonstrates bad faith towards customers. Here MS was confidently promoting a solution and at the same time they clearly had to have known that they were going to pull the rug out from that solution a short time later. Are there refunds being offered to people who were misled into buying the solution that is being essentially given for free? Is it recommended that they now switch from Covast to the Microsoft copy of Covast?
3. How are existing Microsoft/Covast customers going to be supported, now that Microsoft has taken over the revenue stream and potential for new clients for Covast?
4. A product that radically changes course within three months time should raise a red flag to any professional (excluding fanboys).
5. This is essentially a version 1 release. How long until version 3?
So in a very short time, Microsoft has once again demonstrated a lack of concern for partners, a lack of concern for customers, and a willingness to mislead, use and discard any party at any time. I guess there is no concern for a business reputation here? No concern for the customers who have been lead down a dead end?
Let me remind you of the last arrogant player in the EDI arena: Harbinger. The thought the customer was at their mercy in the late 90s and they found out the hard way that if you don't care about the customer's concerns, you get dumped. Here is their URL, you can check how well that worked out for them. http://www.harbinger.com/
I realize it was perceived as a gain to eat and discard Covast, but did anyone consider the loss?
What am I supposed to tell my customers?
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Clearly you've got passion about the topic. Maybe you work for Covast, don't know. And it's only my thoughts here, not my employer.
I bought my wife a RAZR phone a year+ ago and spent $400. Now I could buy one for $79. Phone is still good, I just spent more money up front to fill a need. Someone who bought BizTalk 2006 + Covast 2 months ago, will still have a perfectly good working solution 1,2,3 years from now. Could they get the base capability for "free" in 12 months? Yes, but most of my customers have needs today, and need solutions today. I haven't stopped telling folks about Covast, but I also let them know where the BizTalk product is heading. While we'll have upgrade assistance ready to move from Covast to the R2 stack, there's no reason the combination purchased today would be less than useful.
I haven't been involved in the politics of us adding this offering, but I suspect that we believe this is a long-term win for customers. Same things as with the adapters last year. I had customers buy the Peoplesoft adapters from iWay, and shortly thereafter, we purchased the IP and "gave" it away for free. In my experience, my customers were less depressed about the $$ already spent, and more excited to actually get quality support from Microsoft for the bits and be assured of a long term integrated platform. But, I'm sure others feel differently. Can only go off my own experience. Admittedly, this is a tricky time window for someone like myself in technical sales/consulting because I need to position solutions that work right now, while also educating my customers of long term implications of an investment today.
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For the record, no, I don't work for Covast.
An EDI translator is not a Razor phone.
Let me ask you – why would you move your customers from Covast to R2 and at the same time make an argument that if you just bought Covast, it is still good for three years?
What is your customer who just payed for the implementation of a product going to say when you tell him "we're changing everything we just did"? Is he going to be happy about paying you to do all that work all over again?
If I were your customer, I'd get rid of you and your software, because you have failed. You led me into a product with no shelf life and you are charging me to redo your work all over again. And since you have already proven yourself a failure, why the heck would I use you to do it again? I'd go a different direction with someone new.
I believe it is an improvement for the customers, only in the respect that the product can finally do out of the box what it has been sold as all along. The thing to be noted is that Microsoft has been deceiving customers about the capabilities of this product for an embarrassing amount of time.* That's the real arrogance, not the way they buddied up with Covast and then cannibalized them – it's the fact that they have been deceiving people into a product with inadequate traditional EDI capability all this time. This board is a testament to that. Look at all the people asking about how to hack schemas to do traditional EDI.
* I recall in implementing HIPAA on BT2000, when I looked for 997 functionality there was an asterisk which told the customer to "hire Microsoft Consulting Services to write this piece of functionality." I mean really…
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Anonymous posts are fun for everyone! It's a shame you've had a rough experience; many of BizTalk Server's 6000+ successful customers would disagree with your assessment.
To my knowledge, Microsoft has never positioned BizTalk's out of the box EDI as a "full" capability. The pitch has always been BizTalk + partner if you want anything but basic EDI functionality. EDI isn't easy to do, regardless of technology applied, so that's why you see questions on the topic. Be honest.
Similar case with Business Process Management (BPM) now. BizTalk by itself isn't full BPM (as the market defines it), but, BizTalk PLUS partner solutions can provide our customers with a full complement of functions. Does that mean that if I recommend a third party BPM product (which integrates with BizTalk), and 3 years from now we offer parallel functionality in the BizTalk products that it's a bad investment or deceitful? Not necessarily. It means we're growing the BizTalk function base to do more and more out of the box.
BizTalk is hardly a product with no shelf life, and if you’re forced to redo projects on each release, then odds are you are a weak architect who hasn’t built solutions that accommodate change. Our customers have known for years that BizTalk releases updated versions every 18 months are so, and moving forward has one of the most exciting roadmaps of any Microsoft product. While the upgrade story from 2000/02 was admittedly rough (do to a wide-ranging framework upgrade), we've worked hard to protect the existing investments folks have made.
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[quote user="rseroter"]
Anonymous posts are fun for everyone! It's a shame you've had a rough experience; many of BizTalk Server's 6000+ successful customers would disagree with your assessment.
To my knowledge, Microsoft has never positioned BizTalk's out of the box EDI as a "full" capability. The pitch has always been BizTalk + partner if you want anything but basic EDI functionality. EDI isn't easy to do, regardless of technology applied, so that's why you see questions on the topic. Be honest.
[/quote]Actually, EDI is easy to do with proper knowledge and capable products. Be honest.
Even when it was "jumpstart kit", Microsoft asked me to do a pilot, which I agreed to participate in, and then they withdrew because the product "wasn't ready". So even the first stab, they were pushing it as a full featured product, but discovered otherwise by themselves, fortunately before wasting our time. Instead, I implemented another product, which is still running happily at that site 6 years later. No 2002 upgrade, no 2004 upgrade, no 2006 upgrade, no radical changes whatsoever, just low impact incremental releases which were included in the maintenance contract. That's ROI.
Furthermore, I can tell you I have been called into other BizTalk projects that were spinning the bowl because the client was sold something that didn't meet their requirements. The original HIPAA product is a direct example of Microsoft selling BizTalk as fully featured, when it wasn't. I had to do a white paper to get the funding at the 11th hour for Edifecs X-Engine to save that BizTalk project.
But that was probably the fault of a "weak client", right Richard?
[quote user="rseroter"]
Similar case with Business Process Management (BPM) now. BizTalk by itself isn't full BPM (as the market defines it), but, BizTalk PLUS partner solutions can provide our customers with a full complement of functions. Does that mean that if I recommend a third party BPM product (which integrates with BizTalk), and 3 years from now we offer parallel functionality in the BizTalk products that it's a bad investment or deceitful? Not necessarily. It means we're growing the BizTalk function base to do more and more out of the box.
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We were discussing the particular case where Microsoft promoted Covast in the 2006 release in March, and then just 3 months later, changed course. That promoted a potential bad investment, at the very least, and was deceptive to both the 3rd party and the end customer. Be honest.
[quote user="rseroter"]
BizTalk is hardly a product with no shelf life, and if you’re forced to redo projects on each release, then odds are you are a weak architect who hasn’t built solutions that accommodate change. Our customers have known for years that BizTalk releases updated versions every 18 months are so, and moving forward has one of the most exciting roadmaps of any Microsoft product. While the upgrade story from 2000/02 was admittedly rough (do to a wide-ranging framework upgrade), we've worked hard to protect the existing investments folks have made.
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What is evidenced here is that you haven't answered any of the questions. Instead, you lash out and insinuate that I am a weak architect for not predicting where the product was going in the next releases? That's a pathetic response, Richard.
Frankly, 2002 to 2004 was also a bad upgrade. I wrote a replacement for the migrator to allow us to retain our custom functoids from 2002 , but we never did a 2004 production release, because of the issue of deployment and maintenance of all the dependent assemblies for a large scale enterprise. 2006 added nice large file handling capability, and the deployment pieces missing from 2004, but now that were just about to purchase 2006 with Covast, everything has changed, and we are now forced to re-evaluate. Part of the consideration is that we are reimplementing a platform that we just implemented 2 years ago. That is not ROI, and don't blame me for that, Richard.
I am sorry I have offended you. I have been an EDI architect for over 10 years, and I was offering my comments from that perspective. They are not unique.
Also consider that I am a customer of yours, not the other way around. Do you even want my business? How do you think your responses are impacting my product selection in the future? Is this how you treat all of your customers, by casting veiled insults at them for complaining about your poor choices?
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Not offended in the least. I'm only participating in this "conversation" so that Stephen doesn't have to. Sorry if you didn't like the jab, but you can only throw around "arrogant", "bad faith", "misleading" and "failure" around so much before it comes back at you. You haven't offered anything constructive in your rant that helps anyone out, so really no reason to keep it up.
Always looking for people's business when our solutions meet their needs. As a consultant (or whatever role you are), it's your job to evaluate and consider each technology. If you don't think Microsoft's products are the right fit for technical reasons, then that's the advice you should give you customers, regardless of hurt feelings. However, in my experience, many of our products do offer the capabilities that the my customers need at a price they can handle. Match up BizTalk with virtually any other EAI/B2B/BPM product in the space, and compare the price.
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