Loek Bakker

BizTalk Server is often positioned as a means to create a hub-and-spoke architecture. However, the popularity of the hub-and-spoke architecture, the traditional model for enterprise application integration (EAI), is declining. More and more architects and CIOs are targeting SOA (service-oriented architecture), and its infrastructural incarnation: the enterprise service bus (ESB). Does BizTalk fit into this ESB picture? Integration Architecture Trends and hype like SOA, EDA (event-driven architecture), and BPM (business process management) put integration on top of the list for most CIOs and IT managers. While all these trends hold assumptions about the ideal architecture for distributed computing, the differences in architectural approaches are not as clear to decision makers. Add that to the rapid changes evolving in the Microsoft platform, and it is easy to see tha... (more)

BizTalk Server 2004: Too Hot to Handle?

Recent trends in IT such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web sevices, in conjunction with the still-increasing popularity of the .NET framework, put Microsoft's BizTalk Server in the center of attention for CIOs, CTOs, architects, and enterprise developers. Apparently everyone who is involved with the Microsoft platform now wants to implement BizTalk. Frequently we see that BizTalk is not implemented in areas where the benefits of the technology can be maximized. This leads to disappointment about the value of BizTalk, even though the problem is in the application of t... (more)