Why BizTalk?

We love BizTalk. It flexibly connects systems and organisations, and allows you to automate your business processes. It provides a framework for an efficient, flexible, maintainable, reliable, reusable, scalable and secure interfacing architecture.

Systems and partner integration and process automation are increasingly significant issues in the current business climate, and BizTalk provides a fantastic platform for implementing these links and process flows. More specifically it provides an integrated array of interfacing services including transport, transformation, validation, security, orchestration, distribution, tracking, rules-engine processing and versioning. Supported data formats include XML, CSV, EDI, JSON and HL7, and there is out-of-the-box support for most transport protocols (including of course web and cloud services along with databases and more basic file-based scenarios) and many common systems and applications. As a platform it is inherently customisable, and there is also a healthy market in third-party add-ons, for example providing easy direct access to specific applications not otherwise directly supported.

BizTalk is modestly priced and very stable, and there's an established skills market. Properly implemented a BizTalk solution should reduce costs, increase output quality and provide a great return on investment.

BizTalk acts in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business Process Management (BPM), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) roles. It's not the only product operating in this space, but in our experience as an overall package it is usually the most applicable solution. As a platform it is still evolving as new interfacing best practices emerge, and exciting new developments like the ESB Toolkit provide for even greater implementation flexibility.

For more information on BizTalk, including case studies, please see http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk.

Of course BizTalk is only half of the equation - a BizTalk implementation is only as good as your BizTalk implementer. A poorly designed or implemented solution that for example does not properly consider likely future changes or automated error handling can create a huge burden and undermine many of the original benefits.
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