The renewal of the gold label coincides with Microsoft's recent announcement that BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT is now available in the box with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2. By embedding the accelerator's capabilities in BizTalk Server, R2 customers will be able to automatically integrate their financial messaging networks with SWIFTNet and take advantage of increased automation of corporate-to-bank communications.

By leveraging BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT's rich capabilities for SWIFT messaging standards, customers across all industries will be able to ensure operational efficiency and standardise global banking connectivity as part of their investment in BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

"Corporations across all industries need to link financial messaging technologies with everyday business process management applications. Microsoft's decision to provide BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT will help them with this," said Gottfried Leibbrandt, head of Markets, SWIFT. "This in-the-box availability makes it easier for organisations to achieve streamlined and automated payments activities. We look forward to continuing to work closely with Microsoft to help further achieve these goals."

"BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT has been a significant part of our discussions at Sibos for more than five years now, and it is a credit to the continual development of new and additional features that it has again received the SWIFTReady Gold Financial EAI Label," said David Vander, managing director of Banking, Worldwide Financial Services, Microsoft. "SWIFT continually raises the bar for companies looking to be certified with this label, and the addition of ISO 20022 standards to this year's requirements is indicative of multiple industries moving further towards leveraging standardised business flows in the payments area."

BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT is available in the box with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 today. Beginning December 2007, customers will also benefit from ISO 20022 support when the BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT v3.0 Service Pack 1 is released. Adding BizTalk Accelerator's capabilities to the core server product demonstrates how Microsoft is simplifying support for SWIFT standards and enabling customers and partners across all industries to develop integrated applications for SWIFTSolutions. By combining the specialised skills and experience of its partners with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2, Microsoft will allow customers to benefit from the most streamlined connections to SWIFT.

"Customers and partners need a service-oriented architecture and business process management platform that enables complete connectivity, interoperability and integration from end to end," said Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. "With BizTalk Server 2006 R2, we have extended this effort one step further, to where the 'last mile' of business value is added, by providing out-of-the-box components for partners that need to build SWIFT solutions."