What are some viable alternatives to BizTalk Serve

Question

In evaluating different systems integration strategies, I've come across some words of encouragement, but also some words of frustration over BizTalk Server.

What are some pros and cons to using BizTalk Server (both from a developer standpoint and a business user), and should companies also consider open source alternatives? What viable alternatives are out there?

EDIT: Jitterbit seems like an interesting choice. Open Source and seems to be nicely engineered. Anyone on here have any experience working with it?

Answer 1

My experience with BizTalk was basically a frustrating waste of time.

There are so many edge cases and weird little business logic tweaks you have to make when you are doing B2B data integration (which is probably the hardest part of any enterprise application) that you just need to roll your own solution.

How hard is it to parse data files and convert them to a different format? Not that hard. Unless you're trying to inject a bloated middleware system like Biztalk into the middle of it.

Answer 2

I came across Apatar (unable to post url, but Google finds it) while looking for a solution cheaper than BizTalk. I have yet to try this out.

My last company had many problems with BizTalk being too complex and ridged, but I can’t help but think this was mainly down to the implementation the consultant did.

Answer 3

My experience with BizTalk and doing B2B integrations is that most organizations do not truly do schema first design or fully understand xml standards for that matter. Most tend to weave objects and hope they materialize into meaninful schemas. In an enterprise environment, this is backwards.

BizTalk does have a learning curve, but once you get it you are rewarded with durability, performance, true scalability, and extensibility. Like most have said though, it best to make sure it meets your needs and contort your needs to BizTalk.

In the past I have worked with BizTalk 2004 through 2009, and another product called webMethods.

Answer 4

In the OSS space (though I've never used them as a BizTalk replacement personally - this is anecdotal) you can use one of the Java/J2EE Messaging engines such as OpenMQ (which is the Sun enterprise one rebadged and without support). If you need Orchestration / Choreography (i.e. SOA/ESB pieces) on top of this, you could look into something like Apache Mule

Answer 5

We've been using BizTalk since version 2004, and now have a mix of versions 2006 R2 and 2004 running. I found that the learning curve was quite severe, and development time for solutions is not always quick. Those are definitely shortcomings. Where BizTalk really excels is in its fault tolerance, gauranteed delivery, and performance. You can rest assured that data will not get lost. Retry functionality and fault tolerance robustness is baked in so generally speaking if systems are down BizTalk will handle that and successful delivery will occur once systems come back on line. All these issues such as downtime, etc that are important in an integration scenario are handled by BizTalk.
Further, generally speaking when developing solutions BizTalk abstracts the communication protocols and data formats of the native systems by dealing with everything as xml, so when developing solutions, you typically don't have to wrote code specific to those systems, you use the BizTalk xml framework.

In the last year, we've implemented a java open source engine called Mirth for our HL7 routing. I found that for HL7 purposes, the HL7 adaptor for BizTalk is a challange to work with. Management dicated that we use Mirth for HL7 routing. Where BizTalk falls down in terms of learning curve, Mirth makes up. It is far easier to develop a solution. The problem with mirth is that it doesn't really have any gauranteed delivery. Most of the adaptors (except for hl7) have no retry functionality so if you wanted that you'd have to write your own. Second, Mirth can lose date if it goes down. I would call it very easy to use (although there is no documentation) but I'd be hard pressed to call it an enterprise solution. I'm going to check out jitterbit which was mentioned by someone else.

Answer 6

There is always Sun's (now Oracle) OpenESB framework. Its generally speaking a smaller, lighter version of Biztalk but with roughly all the same features.

You do get to write more code with it, though.

Its Open Source as well.