It’s been more than a few years since DMS authored our paper “What to do about your BizTalk investment?“. In that paper we highlighted the prospect of BizTalk Servers great run coming to a potential end of life. We then outlined approaches that we’d seen work for clients wanting to migrate BizTalk to Azure Integration Services.

That was over two years ago and many migrations since! In this post we want to update you with our most recent observations regarding BizTalk Server migrations. We’ll do this by reflecting on items that impact migration and responding to two questions: (1) What has changed since we published that February 2023 paper? …and… (2) What has remained the same? Here goes…

Reflecting on what’s changed, and what’s the same:

Good news – there is more documentation out there

When we wrote our original BizTalk migration paper there wasn’t much related to actual migration. This has improved, most notably on the Microsoft front, see their documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/biztalk-server-migration-overview This has the impact of helping teams approaching BizTalk migration, not just directly but also implicitly through the use of AI tooling like chat-GTP/Copilot that have taken the market by storm since our original article was authored!

Solution Documentation still critical

Talking documentation, how well documented are your BizTalk solution implementations? If not, or even if just out of date, you will need to address this. Mark Bramble’s BizTalk documenter tool remains a great choice and is little changed since we wrote our first migration paper. If you want to learn more about this tool check out the excellent post from our friends at BizTalk360

More Good news – Azure has continued to mature along with alternate options.

First, AIS (Azure Integration Services) has addressed many feature gaps on the PaaS side. We won’t drain list here (could be another post! 🙂 ) but most notable and welcomed are items like support for X12 EDI in LogicApps, improved SOAP WSDL support and improved import of XSLT from BizTalk maps. Many of these original BTS solution items result from many hours of implementation and it’s a big saving to be able to reuse and leverage.

Second, we should highlight other options have not stood still. For example, the Power Platform space has benefitted from continued Microsoft investment. This means services like Power Automate may now be a viable alternative for your target migration needs.

The March of AI

Perhaps the biggest industry phenomena since our Feb 2023 paper has been the ascendent rise of AI enabled tooling into the mainstream. Currently AI will not migrate a BizTalk solution for you alone but it can be a huge help especially in the areas of documentation, test authoring, and acceleration of some code work e.g. for Azure Functions implementations. Going forward it also has the potential to bring new power to your business processes. For more on that see our recent article “The AI Advantage Enhancing Business Processes for Competitive Success“.

Drivers for Migration Remain

One thing that has not lessened is the need for organizations to address their BizTalk Server investments and plan ahead for life beyond BizTalk Server. Unless you can switch it off, that means migration of your integration solutions. We’ll highlight two reasons driving the BizTalk Server migration here. Both existed in Feb 2023, but both have been heightened since:

• Future support doubtful – Yes, BizTalk is still supported today but despite plenty of opportunity Microsoft has not intimated any intention to make release/support beyond its already extended mainstream support date of 2028. Another factor is the underlying technologies BizTalk depends on. With CU (Cumulative Updates) applied BizTalk Server can run on more recent versions of Windows/SQL Server but there will be an engineering and economic limit on how far Microsoft will be prepared to continue. We should consider ourselves warned.

• There are better options today – Since we authored our paper this has become an even more compelling reason than end of mainstream support. More than two decades since its release, this should not surprise the reader. We simply did not have the cloud-based options available today when BizTalk was originally released, let alone their maturity and proven usage. Example: if you or your team are intimidated by troubleshooting and applying changes to workflow in your current BizTalk Orchestration then you’re going to seriously love the new experience in Azure Logic Apps.

Expertise is still needed

Given the veritable Lego box of integration features that BizTalk provided, and the wide variety of client solution environments it was used in, there are too many permutations for it to be realistic to fully automate migrations. That is as true today as it was when we authored our 2023 paper. Witnessing the lack of updates on tooling like Azure Integration Migrator tool (see repo link here) can perhaps be seen as validation regarding the applicability of automation to migrate these solutions. While attempts have been made, we observe that time and again migrating these solutions requires expertise. That means you are going to have to either find that expertise, or invest time developing it. 

Migration Strategies

This choice remains today: Big bang or incremental. Take your pick. What has changed since our original paper is the benefit of hindsight and experience. We’ll share the DMS opinion simply here:  “Poco a poco” (little by little) still wins the day! While you can do ‘big bang’, for many the risk versus reward does not make sense. Far better to group related sets of integrations into smaller subsets and tackle one at a time. You’ll benefit from increased learning and speed as you go. You will also find your risk landscape far easier to manage.

What’s holding you back?

OK, so what’s stalling everyone doing BizTalk migrations? Aside from the complexities involved in many of these solutions that can drive procrastination. What we observe today as back in Feb 2023, is a continued reticence to spend money and get what appears to be essentially the same functionality. The answer here is to focus your migration investment on the resulting output value. This is especially critical if you are an enterprise business seeking committee sign-off on your budget to do this. It is critical that you do not target migration outcomes for the same functionality. Instead, target these outcomes:

• Improved system integrations. Focus on the feature improvements that are most critical to your business!

• Reduced support costs – from frontline admins to software vendor contracts.

• Increased agility – improve your response time to evolve system integrations.

The amount of effort you want to put into measuring and setting KPI for the above points is down to personal taste and organizational policy. Regardless, the point is, do not migrate for the sake of migration. Without these target outcomes you’ll be missing critical value, that is if your business does not stall you until you complete this diligence.

SUMMARY:

BizTalk Server has had a fantastic run, and we should celebrate that. Any technology that makes it into its 3rd decade is due some serious respect. However, we need to be cognitive that it seems highly likely that BizTalk will eventually be “retired”, that better options exist today, and that as timelines go for enterprise integrations that took many years to create and evolve, April 2028 is not all that far away. If you would like help to migrate your existing BizTalk Solutions, reach out to DMS Group. This is core domain knowledge for us and we’d welcome the chance to help your BizTalk migration succeed.