The development of the adapters results from a joint agreement that Volante and Microsoft signed earlier this year to help provide financial services customers with straight-through processing (STP) solutions in a Microsoft .NET environment. The joint effort addresses the challenge of application integration in financial services by providing easy and cost-effective ways to address the various industry and internal financial messaging formats.

Now with the Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT, a software solution that supports SWIFT messaging, and Volante's CMS, FIX adapters and COBOL adaptors, and market data format plug-ins for services such as Reuters, customers can obtain a wide range of financial messaging adapters for BizTalk Server 2004 through Microsoft and its partner.

"Volante is always focused on bringing business value to customers and the support for BizTalk Server 2004 only enhances our ability to do that," said Vijay Oddiraju, chairman and founder, Volante Technologies. "Now customers get the benefit of building complex messaging applications along with powerful workflow capabilities in less time and at lower price points than previously available."

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004, part of the Microsoft Windows Server System, provides foundational technologies - including business-process orchestration, single sign-on capability, and human-based workflow and Web services support - that enable customers to build tailored e-business solutions to connect people with information and processes. Built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and integrated into Microsoft Office System and Visual Studio .NET 2003, BizTalk Server 2004 addressed the unique needs of information technology professionals, information workers and developers to increase efficiency and productivity.

"Volante has created the ability for BizTalk Server to work with two important messaging protocols in the financial services industry," said Kenny McBride, managing director, Securities & Capital Markets, at Microsoft. "The combination of BizTalk Server and the adapters will help our customers more easily develop fully integrated solutions for trade and pre-trade activities, enabling them to capitalize on new business opportunities and benefit from straight-through processing with exchanges that use CMS or FIX, such as the NYSE."

Using Volante's offerings, which are seamlessly integrated into BizTalk Server 2004, customers can leverage BizTalk's powerful orchestration facilities to manage workflow or to handle exceptions and repair trade messages, all without having to deal with the complexities of formats such as CMS and FIX. In addition, Volante Composer(tm) with its various Format Plug-ins allows customers to receive, transform, validate, process and send financial industry messages such as CMS and FIX without any low-level hand coding.

"The BizTalk Server architecture lends itself to modularization. Domain specialists such as our company can leverage this architecture to capture functionality, such as connections to proprietary and financial industry standard formats, that are extremely valuable to customers," said Krishna Sudarshan, chief technology officer, Volante Technologies. "This functionality, together with BizTalk Server's robust architecture, has the potential to have a significant impact on integration in the financial services industry."

The FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol is a messaging standard developed specifically for the real-time electronic exchange of securities transactions. The CMS (Common Message Switch) protocol is used with exchanges such as AMEX and NYSE.