BizTalk Migrations to Azure Integration Services

Key Takeaways

Kent Weare is an experienced leader who possesses strong technical skills. He is passionate about architecture with a specialty in integration. He is the Principal Product Manager for Azure Logic Apps at Microsoft. Kent has been in the integration space for most of his career, and it goes back to 2004 when he started working with BizTalk. You will see him actively participating in technology communities outside his core work responsibilities. Kent is a speaker at Technology events in Canada, the United States, and Europe. He has been recognized for these efforts by Microsoft as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP).

What are the challenges that customers face during the migration?

When Kent joined the Logic Apps team in March 2022, part of his charter was to look at the BizTalk migration to Azure integration services. Since March, he has spent much time in this space and talked to many consultants and customers. A lot of people ask about what they’re looking for from Microsoft to help customers make this transition from BizTalk to Azure integration services. Upon request, they conducted a series of surveys, where they had a lot of interviews, and sessions, whether with MVPs or with the partner advisory council. What they analyzed is that there’s a big gap, a big sort of knowledge gap, between BizTalk and Azure integration services. People are very familiar with BizTalk. In Azure, the underlying platform is different things to think about when we get to the cloud around scalability and how we support customers in multiple regions and geographies. In general, we see that there’s a gap when it comes to architectural guidance.

What are the business impacts of moving to the cloud?

In many regards, whenever organizations create iPass platforms, you obviously want to have rich features and capabilities out of the box. But the reality is that when you’re an integration developer and in those situations with that project manager, you’ve got tight timelines. You need an extensibility capability, and you’ll look to custom code because that’s where you have the most control. If we look at BizTalk and where you can use custom code, you can create assemblies and call those assemblies.

What’s the Azure Integration Services roadmap for BizTalk customers planning for migration?

At the Integrate conference in June 2022, Balan Subramanian, Product Director at Microsoft, gave the keynote. As a part of the keynote, he did have a slide that outlined their investments in this area. Around BizTalk migration, he discussed the investments they need to make as a product group to help these top customers move their workloads. Kent also gave us a lot of information regarding the migration support planned by Azure. He gave us a sneak peek at the migration guidance document and the migration support Azure intends to provide for its end users. Tune in to learn more about this!