Before to start with this my post I want to thank my friend and BizTalk expert, Sandro Pereira, to help me for the review and others technicals contributions.
I’m very happy in these days for all of the good news I listen around BizTalk Server.
I work with BizTalk from many years and I followed all of the story of this great product, one of the things that makes me happier is seeing everything I had already imaged a year ago, and many people called me “crazy” 🙂
I think this is one of the most important moment for BizTalk Server, the new architecture features are revolutionary for it.
I take some picture from the slides of Teched America, you can find all resources at the end of this post.
In the first, as I supposed BizTalk go to the cloud as IaaS, and this is the more convenient move that Microsoft can did to use the most important solution around Integration and protocol standard trasmission that Microsoft has.
Putting BizTalk in the cloud, in a VM, means you have all the great BizTalk feature as accelerators in the cloud.
For example means the possibility to use accelerators ad HL7 in the cloud to offer the service comunication protocols to the hospitals and this is one of the reason because Microsoft work in intensive mode around MLLP port.
Means to use all of great BizTalk features as advanced mapping, advanced routing architecture strategies, advanced reliable messaging architecture strategies, all in the cloud, advanced business monitoring and so on.
To be consistent in cloud BizTalk must consuming REST services and the next version do that and I think that the possibility to expose REST will arrive quickly, and to have more possibility to create more consistent ESB architecture, the ESB toolkit is improved with dynamic send port concept and it will be part of the product, to more informations you can read this interest post of Kent Weare.
But one of the things that makes me more happier too, is when I listen for the first time the name, BizTalk as PaaS.
I saw the alternation of many names and finally I see the correct name, this is the better strategy that Microsoft can decide!
The use of this name is significant and if we observe this slide we can understand one important aspect about the use of BizTalk in cloud, I think that this first official step of BizTalk migration in Cloud.
I highlighted the most important, is the most natural strategy, using of BizTalk Server with Azure Service Bus Connect to use both in the best mode and for the specifics features.
Witch will allow us to connect in an easy and elegant way application in the cloud with application on-perm or extend on-perm application to the cloud Is this way we’ll have a robust solution to connect the apps in the Cloud with On-Premise applications or to expose On-Premise applications to the Cloud.
Others scenarios could be using BizTalk server for the specifics problematic that only BizTalk can solve easly and use Service Bus, for example, to make easy relay, or for big scale perfomance trasmission, to integrate LOB system in large scale,to work with EDI in large scale. (see picture below)
and the other more natural scenario is in EDI solutions
But we must consider the another important scenario,
I think that BizTalk will become surely a product end to end in the Cloud.
But we must consider the most important scenario, where BizTalk Server is considered the best product on the world market, the area On Premise.The new version, like its predecessors, provides many new great features, see the most importants below
I’ll discuss in deep more about it at WPC 2012 Italy
You can find more resources about this viewing this TechEd video with slides on channel9
Application Integration Futures: The Road Map and What’s Next on Windows Azure
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/AZR207
Building Integration Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk On-Premises and on Windows Azure
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/AZR211
