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By Peter Judge, 22 November 2002 15:40

NEWS Microsoft plans to replace its three products in the ebusiness arena with one suite, the company announced at its annual IT Forum conference today. The suite, codenamed Jupiter, will combine the features of BizTalk Server, Content Management Server and Commerce Server, and will ship around the end of 2003. It will replace all three of the servers on the market today. Dave Wascha, product manager for the new programme, said: "The current products will be broken down into components and put into Jupiter. We want to reduce the overlap and redundancy." Users want to have features unified around business processes, not products, he said, and the suite will, like the Office suite before it, take previously separate functions and put them in one box. The functions of the three current products will be referred to under three headings - Processes, Data and People, respectively. Because Microsoft is still a newcomer to this area, the product will emphasise interoperability with others in the area of EAI and B2B commerce, said Wascha. The aim is to produce something that makes it all a lot simpler. "We want business process analysis to be as easy for analysts to use as Excel," he said. The product will use the Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL) proposed by IBM, Microsoft and BEA as a standard. Given this is a bid to expand into a new market, Microsoft will probably offer Jupiter on very enticing terms. "All current CMS, Commerce Server and BizTalk customers with maintenance agreements will get the full Jupiter suite automatically," said Wascha. "The price will not be the sum of the three current products - it is more likely to be the average." This would imply a price of around $30,000 (£19,355) to $40,000 per server. The "Process" functions will be delivered first, as BizTalk 2002 (delivered in February) is replaced by Jupiter modules in the second half of 2003. The other two products will be replaced, and Jupiter completed, early in 2004. Until then, the Jupiter codename will be promoted by pictures of the planet Jupiter and its moons - which amateur astronomers at the IT Forum said had errors such as including the moon Io twice. "Duplicating IO removes a single point of failure," quipped Wascha. Peter Judge writes for ZDNet UK