One of the world’s Top 5 software companies decides to use BizTalk360

Happy New Year to you all, this is the first blog post for this year. I just returned back to work this morning after taking 10 days vacation. When I opened my inbox this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to see the “Signed Agreement” confirmation email from one of the top 5 software companies in the world, going ahead with using BizTalk360 for their BizTalk Server operations and monitoring IT operations. Due to legal reasons I cannot mention the name of the customer directly, but anyone of the top 5 is a great name to have as a customer. Out of the 250+ customers we have now, we already have some really big names like HP, ABB, BP, Ralph Lauren, Asics etc. But we are super excited about this particular customer for various reason. The initial discussion started way back 2 years ago, we constantly had on and off communication with this customer. In the last 6 months of 2014, thing got pretty serious. The customer has already built bunch of internal support tools for BizTalk over the last 10+ year, they reached a point where they need to consolidate all the internal tools, improve them to address some of the new challenges, etc. At this point they decided to take a deep look at BizTalk360. We had series of meeting with their core engineering and support team in understanding their day to day challenges, where they are losing time, operational overheads, what internal tools and procedures they are using etc, we did multiple demonstrations of BizTalk360 to various people in the organisation. Finally we came up with the list of items that’s already present in BizTalk360 and another 50+ items that’s missing. Out of the 50+ missing items some of them are very customer specific and majority of them are very generic features and every BizTalk customer can get benefit from it. As a product company we are very cautious not to get tied in with one customer and serve like a services company for that particular customer. We wanted to add features that are valuable to vast majority of the customers and more importantly not to overload BizTalk360 with unnecessary features. On that basis we agreed to implement 30+ features in BizTalk360 over the period of 6 months. The features were analysed and split into 4 big buckets as P0, P1, P2 and P3 based on priority. We knew some of the features in the list are really cool and must have in BizTalk360. So we agreed with the customer we wanted to go ahead in implementing P0 items as part of our next 7.9 release, while the commercial and other discussions can carry on. We started this work back in October, you’ll see them in 7.9 release before end of January. From our point of view there is absolutely no risk, whether we are going to win this deal or not, the product will get better. The customer was also excited to see our commitment, and it may be the one of the factor that made us win this customer. We believe this is great news, win/win for everyone, for the customer it’s cost and time effective way to get the tools, for us it’s business + making the product better and for all our existing and future customers, getting great features that will help their productivity.