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

As a BizTalk consultant I have to agree at least partly with Eric Z Beard, there are a lot of edge cases that take up alot of time. But quite a few scenarios are handled extremly smooth as well, so it all depends IMO. But when you (Eric) call BizTalk bloated I have to disagree! We've found that the performance and reliability is excellent, it's flexible and comes with a lot of good adapters out of the box.

Answer 2

BizTalk needs to be used correctly, I am a BizTalk developer and my experience with BizTalk is quite good. Its reliable, performant, scalable, contains a lot of built in architectural patterns and build in components to make integration easy and fast, you get security, retries, secondary transports, validation, transformation etc... and what ever you dont have build in with BizTalk you can easily customized with .NET code, its basically a hard earned integration system and you get all this in one box. BUT you need to know how to implement BizTalk correctly, not once I came across solutions that where implemented and often also architected incorrectly.

but the real benefit of BizTalk is that you can implement small solutions and scale up whilst most other integration systems from big vendors will only sell a whole integration pack which can cost much more.

BizTalk is considered the most complicated server from the house of Microsoft.

So any body saying BizTalk is not good dosent know BizTalk period.

Answer 3

I have no direct experience with JitterBit, but I have heard very good things from coworkers.

Answer 4

We evaluated BizTalk at our company and were really disappointed.

We are using IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender (which has lots of (other) problems, too) and the mapping tool of BizTalk is a joke in comparison to WTX.

The graphical tool is not really usable for complex mappings (we have schemas with a few hundred fields in repeating groups) and if you do more than the usual "concat first name and last name to name" mappings, you will be tired of the graphical approach (for example the arguments of the functoids in the graphical mapper are not labeled and the order in which you connect fields to these arguments is important).

The XSLT-Mapper was usable but not really convincing, and even the microsoft rep told us to use a tool like XMLSpy for XSLT and load the resulting XSL file into BizTalk.

A third approach to mapping is to use C#-Code for the mapping, which was not acceptable for us as a general approach (we don't want to teach everyone C#).

In addition to the mapping tool we did not like the deployment in BizTalk. In order to deploy your process, you need to make lots of settings in different tools and places. We had hoped to find a mechanism like a WAR file for Java Web Applications in BizTalk, so that you can give one archive for your whole process solution to your administrator and he can deploy it.

Answer 5

We used BizTalk for a couple of years, but gave it up for our own custom framework that allowed more flexibility.

Answer 6

BizTalk Server's key benefit is that it provides a lot of 'plumbing' around deployment, management, performance, and scalability. Through Visual Studio, it also provides a comprehensive framework for developing solutions, often with relatively little code.

The frustration and steep learning curve that others mention often comes from using BizTalk for the wrong purpose and from a misunderstanding about how to work with BizTalk and message-oriented systems in general. The learning curve is not as steep as most people suggest - the essential part of the underlying learning actually focuses on changing thinking from a procedural approach to a stateless message-based approach.

A drawback people often cite is cost. The sticker price can seem to be quite high; however, this is cheap in comparison to the amount you'd spend on developing and supporting features on your own.

Before you consider alternatives, or even consider BizTalk server, you should consider your organization's approach to integration and it's long term goals. BizTalk Server is great in cases where you want to integrate systems using a hub and spoke model where BizTalk orchestrates the activities of many applications.

There are other integration models too - one of the more popular ones is a distributed bus (don't confuse this with the term "Enterprise Service Bus" or ESB). You can also get BizTalk to work as a distributed bus and there are alternative solutions that provide more direct support. One of the alternate solutions is an open source solution called nServiceBus.

When considering whether to use a commercial product like BizTalk, verses something else (open source or developed in house), also consider maintenance and enhancements and the availability of the necessary skill-set in the marketplace.

I wrote some articles that go into more detail about the points I discussed here - here are the links:

• Why BizTalk?
• Top 10 BizTalk Mistakes
• Extensibility Features in BizTalk Server
• Open Source Integration with nServiceBus