What are some viable alternatives to BizTalk Server? [closed]

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

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

Answer 2

My experience with BizTalk was basically a frustrating waste of time.

There are so many edge cases and weird little business logic tweaks you have to make when you are doing B2B data integration (which is probably the hardest part of any enterprise application) that you just need to roll your own solution.

How hard is it to parse data files and convert them to a different format? Not that hard. Unless you're trying to inject a bloated middleware system like Biztalk into the middle of it.