The tool has potential. Its capabilities and visual aspects could be considered rather basic but this might improve, particularly if the business intelligence/analytics aspect is leveraged. Once running well, it could allow (perhaps smaller) companies to successfully improve their customers' experiences through digitalizing customer journey - and we all know that customer loyalty goes a long way. However, whether or not the tool is comprehensive enough to deliver this for larger companies with more complex, multi- and omni-channel interactions is yet to be seen...
BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
As our customers vary in size and maturity, the ROI ranges accordingly.
For younger, smaller businesses this is a useful tool. Digitalization of he customer journey has certainly helped save time and efforts in many cases.
For more mature market players the tool is not always comprehensive enough. Dashboard and report personalization take time and efforts, and sometimes it feels that a dedicated BI tool would be a more suitable solution.
A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.
