BizTalk Server 2013 reached to RTM

Great news!!! Microsoft just announced publicly, about an hour ago, that BizTalk Server 2013 is now “Released to Manufacturing” (RTM)!

BizTalk Server 2013 will be available for download on MSDN starting today (March 21). The English locale SKUs will be available for purchase starting April 2013. Other languages SKUs will be available for purchase starting May 2013. Host Integration Server 2013 will ship at a later date, however, BizTalk Server 2013 is fully compatible with Host Integration Server 2010.

This is the eighth release of BizTalk Server which is another step in the on-going investments that Microsoft is making in BizTalk and more importantly the continuous commitment demonstrated by Microsoft on BizTalk Server.

In this release, Microsoft is focused on the “One BizTalk” vision and have invested both in the on-premises server and in the cloud. (The cloud offerings, which will be released soon, include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities).

For the on-premises BizTalk Server 2013 release, Microsoft has focused on the following themes:

• Cloud Connectivity
• Ability to run existing BizTalk applications in the cloud (IaaS)
• Improved Performance
• Simplified Development and Management Experience
• Support for the latest platform and standards

With BizTalk Server 2013, Microsoft is moving to a per-core licensing model to keep BizTalk Licensing consistent with SQL Server licensing, and reflects the evolution of hardware capacity and the trend towards virtualization and cloud computing. The licensing changes are critical because in recent years the way hardware is been evolved was quite dramatic. Until now BizTalk licensing is pretty much unchanged since the 2004 version! Learn more about the licensing changes in this document.

See the public announcement here

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira