Why most upgrade paths for BizTalk lead to using Azure Logic apps

Introduction 

In today's fast-evolving technological landscape, businesses are increasingly seeking robust and flexible solutions to streamline their integration processes. Microsoft BizTalk Server has long been a cornerstone for enterprise application integration, enabling organizations to seamlessly connect disparate systems, automate business processes, and facilitate communication across diverse platforms. However, with the advent of new technologies and evolving business requirements, the need to evaluate and upgrade your existing BizTalk Server setup has become imperative. Read our article on Why is BizTalk dead? to understand the reasons to plan your upgrade path very soon. 

This article aims to guide you through the essential steps for analysing your current use of BizTalk, understanding your future integration needs, and aligning your IT strategy with modern solutions. We will delve into the considerations for cloud adoption, weigh the benefits of custom-built systems versus low-code or platform solutions, and provide a comprehensive upgrade decision map to help you plot your course. Additionally, we will explore industry trends to understand what most companies are doing in this space. By the end of this article, you will be well-equipped to make informed decisions about what is next for your BizTalk Server to meet the demands of today's dynamic business environment. 

Analyse your current use of BizTalk 

When reviewing your current use of BizTalk, please ensure you look into the following areas. This will gather the required information needed later to use in the decision map. 

1. Existing integrations: Grade each of your existing integrations in terms of:  
   1. Complexity 
   2. Current Usage (Through-put/Response rates) 
   3. Error-rates 
   4. Business value 
   5. Length of future life 
   6. Security classifications for data processed 
   
   
2. Functionality currently used within BizTalk Server: BizTalk has extensive functionality, and you may not be using all of it. Take note if you are using the following:
   1. Messaging,  
   2. Tracking, 
   3. Orchestrations,  
   4. Out of the box Adapters, 
   5. Line of Business Adapters, 
   6. Business Activity Monitoring,  
   7. Business Rules Engine,  
   8. ESB Toolkit,  
   9. Custom Pipelines,  
   10. Custom .NET Helpers for Maps and Orchestrations 
   11. Testing Frameworks like BizUnit 
   12. Deployment Frameworks like BTDF 
   
   
3. BizTalk Server Redundancy. Understanding your current levels of redundancy will help you know what you need as a minimum in your next environment. Review your environment for: 
   1. Running BizTalk hosts across multiple servers for BizTalk compute redundancy 
   2. Using a SQL Server cluster for database redundancy 
      
   
   
4. Document all source and target systems. To understand your infrastructure and network usage you need to know where all the systems you are integrating are hosted. This will indicate to you the types of networks you are traversing thus providing your security and performance requirements.

Understand your future integration needs 

Firstly, it is important to understand any new requirements for the existing integrations that were not implemented yet. Those new requirements may not have been implemented for any number of reasons, but are a primary source of rich future requirements. 

Review your future projects and try to determine what requirements will each of those have. This may be difficult, but getting in touch with your Program office should provide you a list of approved upcoming projects that will get you thinking. 

Are there any regulatory or compliance changes coming up for your industry. These changes are usually the course of large IT project work in itself, but if you can time the implementation of compliance changes into your upgrade path, that will help reduce the overall project rework and therefore timeframe and costs significantly. 

Understand your IT strategy  

Most companies have strategies around cloud, big data, AI and the use of key technology roadmaps for their business systems. Cyber security and transformation offices are also key capabilities being developed. What is your organisation defining as IT strategy, and how does that map to your upgrade path. Below are some key IT trends that are required for you to. 

Cloud  

Cloud adoption has been around for many years already. However, some organisations are still quite immature in their adoption, mature cloud users but moving cloud providers, or being caught in uncontrollable costs quickly putting the organisation in reverse. Whatever the cloud strategy and organisational maturity, make sure you have a good understanding of where your organisation is planning to go. You will most likely need to integrate systems that are on-premises and in multiple clouds. By understanding what your organisation’s preferred cloud is and where all the systems are hosted, you can form a plan where to host the integration platform, and what network paths you will need to traverse to connect to the systems required for integration. 

custom build vs. low code or platform solutions 

As organisations upgrade their systems, they are often posed with the choice of if they should build systems from scratch or buy off the shelf. This is no different for the integration layer. If the organisation sees a system as unique, critical to the business, or it just needs to change fast, the organisation may decide this system is more suitable to build. This applies to the integration layer and there are lots of options in the integration landscape with the rise if iPaaS and Microservices. Knowing if you prefer a no code, low code or custom build solution will be critical to your technology selection. 

Future of line of business systems 

The other dimension that will significantly impact your integration projects are the major business systems you need to integrate. Often large ERP systems like SAP or Salesforce have their own preferred integration platforms. These preferred platforms should be reviewed as their often there are synergies that can create great advantage. Often when these line of business systems don’t have preferred integration platforms, they will have preferred ways to integrate with them. This preferred method of integration becomes a key requirement for your future integration platform since you will no doubt be implementing multiple integrations with future line of business systems. If the integration is quick and low cost for each project with the future line of business systems, then the savings will accumulate over time. 

Upgrade Options 

Now that you have gathered the core information needed to plot out your upgrade path, we lastly need to define the upgrade options we will involve in the decision matrix. This list comes from the main options discussed in the Gartner for Integration Platform as a Service. IBM, TIBCO and Huawei were all in Niche players quadrant and where not considered appropriate for this decision matrix as we focused mainly on Leaders, Visionaries and Challengers. 

• Azure Integration Services (including Logic Apps) 
• AWS Integration Services 
• GCP Integration Services 
• Microservices Architecture in Cloud (Custom Build) 
• Microservices Architecture On-Premises (Custom Build) 
• Dell Boomi 
• Salesforce (Mulesoft) 
• Workato
• Zappier
• SAP Integration Suite 
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Integration Services 
• Software AG 
• Snaplogic 
• Tray.io 
• Jitterbit 
• Celigo 
• Informatica 

Use the upgrade decision map to plot your course 

Now that you have gathered the core information needed to plot out your upgrade path, and listed out the possibly options to move towards, we lastly need to define the upgrade path decisions. 

If you didn’t take into account the possibility of a technical upgrade, then the above decision flow can guide you to a subset of options based on your deployment model choice, cloud alignment and ERP use. However, if you want to stay within the Microsoft ecosystem, and even potentially leverage some technical upgrade paths, you have one choice. That choice is Azure Logic Apps. Logic Apps has continually evolved to take on more of the concepts and specific features that were made so popular with BizTalk. Since it is also based on Azure, you only need to pay for the integration services you use. This means you don’t fall into the old trap of buying a large product brand like BizTalk, and not using a key enterprise feature like BAM.  

Logic Apps supports no code workflows that are built using a JSON language. It has the concept of adapters with connectors. It even supports importing the BizTalk XSD Schemas and XSLT transformation artifacts if you had invested a large amount of effort building these. This includes the flat file schema extensions, which we still all find very powerful. 

What are most companies doing? 

In reality what we are seeing is that companies are not leveraging the technical upgrade options available, and going back to IT strategy for new integration product selection. As part of this decision the most common way of dealing with the existing investments in current BizTalk integrations is as follows. 

Conclusion 

There is plenty to analyse in order to prepare and choose the right upgrade path for your current BizTalk environment. What is important is that your follow the process outlined in the article: 

1. Understand your current BizTalk environment and usage 
2. Determine your future integration needs 
3. Align with your current IT Strategy 
4. Review all top industry options  
5. Make an informed strategy decision that takes your business forward 

Systems Integration is the cornerstone of process automation, regardless of which systems, partners or technologies need integrating. Getting this decision right will enable a key foundation for your organisation to achieve it’s strategic goals, and we can’t underestimate the we have seen organisations obtain by getting this decision right. 

Source: 

• Microsoft named a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Integration Platform as a Service  | Azure Blog | Microsoft Azure