BizTalk Server 2006 R2

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides connectivity, messaging and business process services to an organization's service oriented infrastructure. Through broad support for connectivity to platforms, applications, devices and people BizTalk Server preserves existing investments and minimizes the cost and risk of integrating the new pieces of technology into your SOA initiatives. It enables organizations to expose data and process from line of business (LOB) applications as services and to compose them into new business processes. Because BizTalk Server includes tools to connect both proprietary and standards-based systems and to design, manage and monitor business processes, BizTalk Server is a central part of any SOA & Business Process strategy.

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Microsoft provides a comprehensive ESB offering through its Application Platform including Windows Server, the .NET Framework and BizTalk Server. The Application Platform provides an infrastructure that enables the flexible and secure reuse of infrastructure and business services and the ability to orchestrate existing services into new end-to-end business processes. At the core of this solution is BizTalk Server which provides a basis for common ESB capabilities including:

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Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology helps businesses manage the interconnections between systems that are required for composite applications. ESBs address the maintenance issues associated with point-to-point approaches and help broker the diverse naming, identity, formats and messaging technologies, which are necessary to interconnect the services within applications. The name Enterprise Service Bus reflects the historical focus of ESBs within the enterprise. But as business requirements expand to include interconnectivity between enterprises, and as enterprises factor out portions of their information systems to hosted solutions, traditional ESB approaches become inadequate.

Companies need infrastructure to integrate services for internal enterprise systems, services running at business partners and systems accessible on the public Internet. And companies need be able to start small and scale rapidly. This is especially important to smaller businesses that cannot afford the large investments in IT staff or heavy capital outlay for enterprise technologies. In other words, companies need the strengths of an ESB approach, but they need a simple and easy path to adoption and to scale up, along with full support for Internet-based protocols. In short, companies need Internet Service Bus technology.

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