What is going to happen with BizTalk

During PDC some BizTalk folks wondered what is going to happen with BizTalk now Dublin is coming. I talked with some Microsoft people from the Netherlands and they say is going to be around for at least a couple of years if not longer. In past Charles Young posted a post around difference between Dublin and BizTalk. This week Aaron Skonnard did a post about OSLO and future of BizTalk. I believe and I am no insider that BizTalk is going to be around for a long time, because it is a great application server for integration. With a log list of adapters out of the box, LOB adapters and new WCF adapters it can do enterprise application integration very well. I have done a great deal of integration projects with BizTalk Server and a few are coming up next year. A lot of customers are very happy with the product (at least 2006 or R2 versions). If you talk about business processes it will be a different story, BizTalk is perfect for machine to machine communication and processes; there are many examples out there on the internet. Machine to human is a bit different and I think WF or workflow product like K2 is better at it. Dublin can be a host environment for WF (and WCF), so it would not be unthinkable to have BizTalk as hosting environment for machine to machine processes and Dublin for machine to human processes. If both processes should be supported in a certain scenario that I believe BizTalk (orchestration) will not be leading or drive the overall process, but a workflow hosted in Dublin or maybe K2. So I am not worried as a BizTalk professional about the products future. At least a couple of releases are planned in coming years, 2009 for starters. I hope to learn more during SOA & BPM Conference January next year.


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