Siemens is one of the world's leading electrical engineering and electronics companies. Siemens IT Operations, responsible for delivering IT services companywide, had the challenge of connecting a myriad of dissimilar systems. In 2003, Siemens IT Operations successfully deployed Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 to integrate, monitor, and manage a range of applications and business processes. Anticipating vast growth in the next three years, Siemens IT Operations began testing a prerelease version of BizTalk Server 2006. With the product's new features, the IT group has simplified its system administration tasks, increased its productivity, and cut application deployment time by 83 percent. Migration has been so easy that Siemens IT Operations expects to run BizTalk Server 2006 in daily business operations by November 2005.