Published on : Jan 25, 2016
Category : BizTalk Server
A lot of times, people are puzzled why we care so much about the BizTalk community. We write good blog articles covering
in-depth topics or sometimes fight with the
competitors of BizTalk Server, we publish lot of
white papers and eBooks on BizTalk, we actively run a weekly
webinar on Integration/BizTalk, we organize the most influential annual
conferences about BizTalk Server, we push lot of great content related to BizTalk in our social media channels like
Twitter,
Facebook, and
LinkedIn, and so on.
The reason or logic for us to care so much for BizTalk community is pretty simple. I can relate this topic to the conversation I had with one of my friend last week. He specializes in marketing and he got really frustrated with one of his client selling a dog nutrient product. During their assessment meetings, they came to know that the company does not have any material or genuine care on the well-being of the dogs. My friend’s frustration is that – if you are a company that sells a product that encourages about the well-being of the dogs and if you don’t show any signs of you taking care of them, then it defeats the whole purpose of your product and the reason why you exist.
Even though the product and market are completely different, the same principle applies to us at BizTalk360. We are pretty clear about our mission statement
“To create an awesome productivity tool for BizTalk server customers that will help them to achieve one or more of the following things when it comes to BizTalk Server operations and monitoring”
- Save or make money
- Save time
- Ease pain and sufferings
If our mission is to create a world-class productivity product for BizTalk server customers and if we do not care about BizTalk server and the community, it doesn’t make sense in our personal opinion.
Let’s take a look at how we address the above points in BizTalk360.
To save or make money
If someone takes a serious look at how much money you are losing on your day-to-day BizTalk support activities by simply using standard out of the box tools like BizTalk admin console, it will be mind blowing. Let’s take an example scenario. You have an expensive BizTalk consultant doing the regular day to day support activities. There is a problem raised by your business saying they haven’t received a specific PO from a vendor, this support guy would have spent 3-4 hours to diagnose the problem. If he is charging $100/hour, then that support ticket would cost the company $300 to $400. At BizTalk360, we invest in a lot of
productivity tools,
team knowledge base etc., to either save or make money for our customers. Our goal is to make BizTalk support accessible to anyone.
To save time
Losing money is one thing and time to react to issues is another thing. For a lot of large scale businesses, losing money may be acceptable to some extent. But they cannot accept the time taken to solve the problem. Imagine if you are in a healthcare or financial sector, it’s absolutely critical to diagnose and fix the problem in the shortest possible time. There may be critical impacts like patient health, financial loss etc., which are worth more than few hundred dollars of consultant time. This is also something we take pretty seriously at BizTalk360. We bundle a lot of productivity enhancement tools like Backup/Disaster Recovery Visualizer,
throttling analyser,
advanced event viewer etc., to save time. Things which typically takes hours/days to solve can be solved in minutes using BizTalk360.
To ease pain and sufferings
The previous two points address the value addition for the customers. It’s also important to make sure people who are supporting your BizTalk environments have the right tools to ease their day-to-day pains and sufferings. If you use the standard tool(s) to support your BizTalk environment, you will end up using anywhere from 6 to 10 different tools on a daily basis (BizTalk admin console, SQL Management studio, BAM portal, ESB portal, Event Viewer, Message Box Viewer, Performance consoles, Monitoring consoles etc.,). You can imagine the lost productivity by switching between these tools. At BizTalk360, we always wanted to
create painkiller features rather than vitamin features. It’s not fair to ask your BizTalk people to work with 10 year old MMC snap-in and out-dated web interfaces. It’s time to move on to give them awesome/fresh looking modern web apps.
In short, to answer the question “Why we care about the community?”, we feel it’s our responsibility to make sure BizTalk customers are more productive. BizTalk360 is one vehicle to achieve it and community activities is another most important one to keep the momentum going.