Why BizTalk Server Is Necessary

BizTalk Server integrates line-of-business applications to ensure that they work together to perform complex business processes, such as accepting a customer’s purchase order, arranging for the shipment of the goods, and issuing an invoice. Integrating multiple applications within a single organization is often referred to as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI); integrating applications across organizational boundaries is usually called Business-to-Business (B2B) integration.

There are two reasons why application integration is difficult:

• Applications might describe data about the same object in different and often incompatible ways. A simple example is names: one application might store a first and last name separately while another stores them together.
• Applications often use different and incompatible communication protocols to send and receive data.

To integrate applications, BizTalk Server operates as a hub, transferring business documents (that BizTalk Server treats as a container for a set of data) among applications and translating data into the format that each application requires. (For more background on BizTalk Server, see “BizTalk Server 2000 Orchestrates Business Interaction” on page 3 of the Mar. 2001 Update).