In 1999 AIM Investments in Houston, TX was facing renewal of its license for IBM's MQSI middleware. Instead, the investment firm chose to go with Microsoft BizTalk 2002 and SWIFTAlliance on Windows NT using MSMQ to extract messages from Thomson's Portia and transmit to SWIFT Network.

The old infrastructure had been costly, said Farooq Jawaid, principal and manager, information technology and Investments Administration group at AIM. The firm decided to make the switch after coming across BizTalk and developing a pilot with Avanade.

In six weeks the pilot was running, and in two months the connection to Portia was functioning.

“We used Microsoft's BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT, and the mapping went fast,” said Jawaid. “We can extract data from any source, give the data to BizTalk, which holds all the business rules, and BizTalk sends it to SWIFTAlliance and DTC TradeSuite.” Since its original installation, the firm has moved to Windows Server 2000 and plans to make the move to BizTalk 2004 soon.

“We're very pleased with the results; this is more scalable than our old system and at a lower cost,” he added. “Microsoft has a rich library of SWIFT messages for BizTalk.”

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