Future of Biztalk Looks Good

The last TechEd Conference was a very important one from BizTalk perspective. Several announcements were made, but none of them more important than the fact that Microsoft will continue innovating BizTalk and releasing BizTalk versions for “years to come”. So, all the investments that clients have made so far will continue giving returns. Moving forward, there will be three flavors of BizTalk: BizTalk On-Premise, BizTalk as IaaS and BizTalk as PaaS (Azure Service Bus).

BizTalk IaaS is the most interesting of them. Microsoft will provide templates; users will have choice of selecting number of BizTalk nodes, cluster or non-cluster etc. Once a selection is made, entire BizTalk setup will be created immediately. Users can then move the applications from On-Premise to this new set up. Moving will be as easy as moving from test to a production environment in an On-Premise set up.

Visualization of overall processes is another cool feature that will be part of the Admin console. It will provide a visual of end-to-end process, including dependencies etc. One thing that BizTalk lacks as compared to middleware tools from other vendors like Oracle is visualization. Microsoft intends to close that gap now.

There are lots of other features that will be released in future versions. The key takeaway is that BizTalk is NOT Dead but alive and kicking! This is exactly what I mentioned in a previous blog post “Is BizTalk Dead?”