Likelihood to Recommend - great when you need to integrate applications without any message lost or duplicated and when transnationality is important - if you need the highest throughput possible and not much (or not at all) mapping is required, a system like Kafka is more appropriate
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Just the ability to display and consume data through a single dashboard makes this a great application for our business purposes. With the ability to consume their exposed API, data validation and manipulation becomes a breeze. Read full review 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. Helps in load balancing. Read full review Cons The development and the transformation capability is not so great. I believe IBM is looking to incorporate some of features of IBM APP Connect into API Connect. The authentications features are no way close to CA API Management (f.k.a Laye r7). The development experience is not as good as Apigee's. The GUI should be improved. Maybe the product team should see the other API management tools in their offering. Read full review Microsoft BizTalk is over engineered for some situtations Microsoft BizTalk can be frustrating to use as it forces you to use the GUI as opposed to code Microsoft BizTalk is very resource intensive to create integrations Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is the best on-premise application to cloud integration in the market. I guess IBM is planning to integrate IBM App Connect with the IBM API Connect solution.
Read full review BizTalk will always be required at this hospital.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Usability You can do some really powerful things with this system. The overall design is an attempt to make configurable some of the routine tasks/common functionality, but allow for development/customization of the core of the application.
Read full review I gave a 7 because this product BizTalk does need time and training to get familiar with the usability and features, it is not that easy to use.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Support Rating Support is good, however it takes longer than expected to get responses. When bugs are reported they often seem to fall into a black hole.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure you have everybody and all depts. On board during testing on test server.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Alternatives Considered We did not select Cast Iron as our iPaaS solution, it was the weakest competitor in the field that we evaluated. Our experience was that it was not nearly as easy to learn, without in-depth training and guidance, and the developer UI was extremely buggy. We subjected each of the vendors to a battery of integrations, from simple to challenging, and it fell short on each one. One of the most simple integrations was grabbing a CSV file from an FTP source, parsing the data, doing a small amount of transformation, then inserting that data into an Azure MSSQL DB. After 2 hours on the phone with the Cast Iron support team, we were still unable to get this working.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment I don't see any negative Impact . I like using this tool to do my job. I am comfortable using this tool. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots