BizTalk Services

Windows Azure BizTalk Services, a set of Microsoft-hosted cloud services, offers application-to-application message routing and conversion similar to BizTalk Server. The services are now available for preview and could interest organizations working on business-to-business or cloud integration projects, because using the services could enable faster deployment and lower maintenance effort than running BizTalk Server on-premises or in Azure virtual machines. However, some existing BizTalk Server installations could require considerable work to port to the services as they exist today.

Platform Service for Application Integration

Like BizTalk Server, BizTalk Services enables inbound and outbound messaging, in a variety of protocols and formats, and routing between external systems and a company’s internal applications using Azure Service Bus communications services. BizTalk Services offers a subset of BizTalk Server’s messaging capabilities. For example, the current preview does not offer processing for the widely used U.N. EDIFACT EDI standard, and it provides a smaller (and different) library of message conversion functions. Furthermore, BizTalk Services does not include the Orchestration engine for scripting long-running business processes (such as purchase order processing), so organizations will not be able to use existing BizTalk Server implementations of such processes on BizTalk Services.