Typically, new technologies tend to promise more than they deliver. That has not been the case with Web services, which are being integrated into just about every new e-commerce application. "Support for Web services has come from application vendors, application development tool suppliers and middleware vendors," said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner with market research firm ZapThink.

Steve Martin of Microsoft writes, "Over the past few months we’ve seen an incredible wave of new platform products and technologies including Windows Server 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. You may remember that in the past BizTalk Server has updated features to support the most recent platform releases. With BizTalk Server 2006 once the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were released, we did final testing and sent a new version of BizTalk Server out the door.