AmberPoint, the industry’s leading provider of SOA runtime governance software, today announced that it has expanded its strategic relationship with Microsoft by participating in the Microsoft Business Process Alliance, a select group of ISV partners focused on creating innovative business process management solutions (BPM) on the Microsoft platform at a lower total cost of ownership. As a result of their expanded relationship, AmberPoint and Microsoft are working together to extend the integration of AmberPoint SOA Management System with Microsoft BizTalk Server.

The Microsoft Business Process Alliance is a Microsoft-led initiative to propel mainstream adoption of People-Ready processes by offering customers a powerful set of end-to-end solutions for automating business processes. AmberPoint and Microsoft have established this strategic relationship to ensure that their shared customers are able to fully take advantage of the capabilities of their complementary products for enterprise-class SOA systems and BPM initiatives.

“AmberPoint continues to work very closely with Microsoft to bring valuable capabilities to our shared customers and deliver end-to-end solutions,” said Burley Kawasaki, group product manager in the Connected System Division at Microsoft Corp. “AmberPoint’s SOA runtime governance capabilities bring significant value to customers, who require holistic management capabilities across their service networks in order to create complex business processes through a service-oriented architecture. We are working closely with AmberPoint for a number of SOA-related initiatives.”

AmberPoint delivers comprehensive SOA runtime governance capabilities at each stage of the SOA lifecycle—from development and QA through production use. AmberPoint utilizes a policy-based approach to governance in order to manage the health and well-being of SOA applications, providing the real-time visibility and control necessary to tie services together into business processes.

Both AmberPoint and Microsoft are working together to extend the integration of AmberPoint’s industry-leading SOA runtime governance software, AmberPoint SOA Management System, with Microsoft BizTalk Server. This integration will enable customers of both companies to gain visibility into service interactions within Microsoft BizTalk server, in addition to monitoring and controlling services across distributed, heterogeneous SOA landscapes.

This extended support for Microsoft BizTalk Server enables AmberPoint to apply the full range of its capabilities to the latest Microsoft platforms and create integration points into Microsoft’s Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance (http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/solutions/soa/esb.mspx).

AmberPoint’s participation in the Microsoft Business Process Alliance builds on a multi-faceted relationship with Microsoft reaching back the past five years:

§  AmberPoint runs natively on the Microsoft .NET Framework

§  AmberPoint software ships with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

§  Premier status in the Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program

§  AmberPoint software is Microsoft Certified

§  AmberPoint integrates with Microsoft Operations Manager, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft BizTalk Server

§  Widespread joint success with marquee customer accounts

“We’re very pleased to play an active role in the Microsoft Business Process Alliance,” said Ed Horst, AmberPoint vice president of Marketing and Product Strategy. “The Business Process Alliance is committed to investing in business-driving technologies that deliver real benefits to customers. This represents the latest stage of a strategic business relationship that has continued to grow steadily in the five years since we founded AmberPoint.”

For more information on AmberPoint’s participation in the Microsoft Business Process Alliance, please visit www.microsoft.com/bpm.