It’s finally here folks! After much hand-wringing in the community over the future of BizTalk Server, Microsoft have continued their commitment to their premier on-premises integration platform and announced the release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2.
The main areas of improvement are:
1. Platform Support for Windows Server 8, SQL Server 2012 and Visual Studio 2011.
2. Improvements to the accelerator packs for HL7, HIPPA and SWIFT
3. Better adapter connectivity for DB2 and IBM systems
4. Performance improvements for batch processing, ordered send ports and scale-out host configurations.
5. Even tighter integration with the Windows Azure ServiceBus for cloud-scale integration solutions.
6. Changes to the licencing model to allow cloud-based hosting from a SPLA partner.
Fundamentally these aren’t big changes to the overall BizTalk Server platform, but it demonstrates an on-going commitment by Microsoft to on-premises integration solutions for customers that can’t (or wont) move their systems to the cloud in the future.
Further, by ensuring that BizTalk Server is 100% compatible with the Windows Azure ServiceBus (using the Azure relay & messaging bindings with the WCF adapter), Microsoft are positioning themselves really well for any combination of the following solutions:
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Pure On-premises Integration
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BizTalk Server
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Windows Server AppFabric
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Hybrid Integration
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BizTalk Server
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Windows Server AppFabric
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Windows Azure AppFabric
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Pure Cloud-based Integration
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Windows Azure AppFabric
I think this is a really smart strategy by Microsoft, and those integration consultancies who play in this space would be wise to maintain their on-premises BizTalk expertise so they can deliver all three types of solutions to their customers.
I know we are.