What is BizTalk?

So, we have heard that BizTalk is one of the key's to the next generation of technologies… but what exactly is it?

When people ask what BizTalk is, trainers or salespeople may be inclined to answer: 'it is a set of tools enabling business-to-business exchange'.  But in order to truly understand the power and usefulness of BizTalk, try to think of BizTalk as plumbing.  This plumbing carries text between participants.

NOTE:  This text is actually XML (or 'eXtensible Markup Language') and it is open and extensible, which means it is a low-risk, stable and reliable way of transporting data.

The participants could be companies, components, applications, parts of an operating system or just about anything which needs access to data!  Just as plumbing has an entry and exit point into buildings or containers, BizTalk also supports many protocols through which it can pass data including SMTP (email), FTP, HTTP, MSMQ (message queuing), EDI (electronic data interchange) and more.

Overview

BizTalk Server 2000 is based on the BizTalk Framework.  The BizTalk Framework is an open framework for B2B (or 'business-to-business exchange'), which is being implemented across all major platforms and most major B2B products from other companies.  In addition to being a leading B2B platform, BizTalk is also a new and impressive improvement over previous programming models and presents costs savings when used in internal IT projects.

NOTE:  While BizTalk can be used in externally focused solutions, it is also ideally suited to internal IT solutions.

Built on the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 operating system, BizTalk Server 2000 (or simply 'BizTalk') provides the infrastructure and tools to enable B2B eCommerce and process integration.  BizTalk enables companies to integrate and manage business processes by exchanging business documents (e.g., purchase orders and invoices) between business applications within or across organizational boundaries.

BizTalk also has another major component, it is a website called BizTalk.org (http://www.biztalk.org) and it is a "repository" and "gateway" for BizTalk to enable disparate business applications to exchange documents with each other.

NOTE:  These documents are defined (or structured) using 'schemas' and right now on BizTalk.org there are hundreds of schemas stored in this 'schema repository'.

The progression continues

Let's take a closer look at how business on the Internet has progressed and this may identify for us what the key factors are in successful online business-to-business communications using BizTalk.

The table below shows the overlapping progressive focus shifting away from the early "presence" website, to vertically interconnected "eProcess" business systems by the year 2005.

The progression is from static brochures, through applications such as purchasing, systems integration and communities, to eCommerce and auctions or automatic order fulfilment.  This is an impressive and important concept, that this progress shows:  the speed, flexibility and automation of business is steadily increasing.  Essentially, more can be done using IT (or 'information technology') than ever before.

The key issue in terms of BizTalk is the 4^th column (2000-2005) is where BizTalk will be most active and will a low cost, integrated solution into most online businesses.  Let's take a closer look.

eCommerce

BizTalk will enable business-to-business eCommerce for new and existing businesses, by automating previously manual services, processes and interactions.

eBusiness models

With the interconnectedness of businesses, it is inevitable that boundaries will be re-drawn, new relationships will be struck (perhaps on a worldwide scale) and consequently, new innovative business models (varying from eJIT to partnering and co-opetition strategies) will be created to leverage the faster and more dynamic marketplace which online connectedness brings.

By enabling businesses to visually model their internal, external and inter-business processes, BizTalk will be a key enabler of this exciting new marketplace.

Business process re-engineering

An exciting possibility of this phenomenon may be the rise of short-term, temporary and fully-automated just in time (JIT) electronic relationships (or eJIT)

Customer relationship management

With the automation of many manual functions and processes, the opportunity to provide realtime customer support and increased efficiency will exist.  Leveraging and building on the automated B2B relationships supported by the BizTalk toolset, will enable companies to manage those relationships more effectively and in a more automated way.  By the same token, BizTalk will enable the company to support a far higher number of relationships, without sacrificing the quality of the relationship.

Vortals

'Vertical portals' are already making their presence felt on the Internet.  It is not expected that vortals will create new turnover or sales.  Until 2004 they will mostly be replacing the offline ordering facilities.  Thereafter, there use is expected to begin to generate new orders, rather than fulfill existing order more efficiently.  Their need for document-centric processing, garuanteed document delivery and related features are provided for by BizTalk.

Advanced personalization

Especially when considered in conjunction with Microsoft Commerce Server 2000, the combination of these two products will enable:

Cross-business process automation (eJIT)

When businesses can integrate their own processes with their partner's processes and automate the transaction (while maintaining control, integrity and security) the cost of each transaction will plummet.  With automatic order fulfillment, the level of control and savings which can be exerted over your inventory will be significant.

Evolutionary or revolutionary?

One of the long time "norms" (or is it really only an expectation?) of computing thus far, is that each new major step forward in computing is accompanied by a new language which a particular company owns… consumers get used to mobbing from one language to another, re-developing their exiting investments and so in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest opportunity.

In this way, a proprietary new development language is usually the key to merging the "old" (code, objects and applications) with the "new".  Some call that 'lock-in', but this is where the old cycle ends!

The dependencies in the future will not be as tight as this diagram indicates:

BizTalk will protect your investments and will enable your company to move beyond beyond that expensive paradigm.  With XML messaging between BizTalk Servers, services, applications, devices and many other objects written in a variety of languages can communicate between themselves… without succumbing to one or another proprietary language!

In this new loosely-coupled messaging paradigm, the new design looks like this:

XML is the message

In the section called "XML" on page 62, you can read up on the technical details and the history behind XML, but for now let's focus on the "why" of XML messaging rather than the "how".  The key trends to identify which have led to this exciting, extensible and platform/programming language-agnostic follow on from the reasons why HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) has become so popular… these reasons include:

• the simplicity of learning and using HTML
• the low cost of designing, setting up and maintaining advertising type websites
• the increasingly huge number of people and businesses connected to the Internet

The reasons for the success of XML (extensible Markup Language) follow on very neatly from those posed for the rise and rise of HTML.  The success is clearly shown by this exponential increase in DNS (Domain Name Service) entries.  

DNS entries are URLs (Uniform Resource Location) such as http://www.microsoft.com.

Date:                                                      Number of DNS hosts:

1988                                                        30 000

January 1993                                         1,313,000 

July 1993                                                1,776,000

January 1994                                         ;2,217,000

July 1994                                                3,212,000

January 1995                                         5,846,000

July 1995                                                8,200,000

January 1996                                         14,352,000

July 1996                                                16,729,00

January 1997                                         21,819,000

July 1997                                                26,053,000

January 1998                                         29,670,000

July 1998                                                36,739,000

January 1999                                         43,230,000

July 1999                                                56,218,000

The stunning growth shown during the ninties (90's) shows no sign of abating in the noughties (00's) either!  Domain usage will continue to grow.  People will continue to buy domains for themselves, their family and companies will increasingly buy domains for their products, services and ideas.

But as the use of HTML has grown, the need for XML has intensified also.  Some of the most common reasons for using XML include:

• a desire to communicate in non-proprietary and standards-based way (this is achieved using XML)
• to expose data over the Internet in a controlled and useful way
• to exchange data between business systems in an automated, process-driven way
• to enable software development which spans companies and spans relationships while supporting roles, rules and change

As you can see in the image below, technology, innovation and the very human (and also a business-driven need) to communicate, has moved the Internet from connectivity, through presentation or brochure-style websites, and now into the era of programming for (and on) the web using toolsets like BizTalk.

This figure shows how the Internet has grown from connectivity, through presentation and now to being an environment where programmers are creating web services to consume and serve data.

In order to achieve this business exchange of data via web services, the data format of choice will be XML.  As described on page 62, XML is simply a structured text format which contains your data for exchange or manipulation.  Because it is platform-independent and a standards-based and 'open' format (in other words, anyone can understand the contents of the XML file - if it is not protected by encryption) this in turn will lead to data exchanges occurring more frequently.