20 years on from the first release on January 15th 2000, Microsoft announced the release of BizTalk Server 2020. For Microsoft it was a low-key launch but that shouldn’t diminish the plethora of new features shipped in the product.
For organisations that have invested heavily in previous releases; this is not simply an update but a game changer release. At the simplest level it is re-stating Microsoft’s commitment to BizTalk Server as we now enter at least 10 years of support, at the higher level it’s delivering a product that supports todays platforms.
With this release Microsoft has committed to 5 years regular support and 10 years extended support. For any enterprise it is important to have this commitment as betting on a product that might not exist in two years is just not sensible.
Since the first release of BizTalk Server there have been 11 releases in total (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2006R2, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2013R2, 2016 and now 2020). Having worked with some of the best BizTalk engineers in the business, the team at Cluster Reply are just as excited by this release as we were with he the beta of 2000.
The importance of commitment is very clear in Microsoft’s delivery – interestingly enough I believe this is the 5th team that have worked exclusively on BizTalk Server and its associated tools, delivering an excellent product once again.
At Cluster Reply we are also just as committed to BizTalk Server 2020 and are able to bring our knowledge and expertise to bear for both new and existing organisations wanting to exploit the power of BizTalk.
One of the key features of a BizTalk Server release is platform alignment - that is alignment with the latest and greatest. There are four key platforms that support BizTalk; the Windows Server Operating System, SQL Server data platform, Visual Studio development platform and finally Office 365 for all communication and data analysis platforms.
This release gives us alignment with:
Where BizTalk has always provided integration support that is head and shoulders above the rest is with vast group accelerators and adapters that make the job of integration so much more achievable. This release provides a considerable advancement of the accelerator and adaptor set providing improved SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, HL7 and SWIFT support.
In this release the tooling all BizTalk developers rely on has been rebuilt and improved to use the best features of Visual Studio 2019. This should mean the upgrade path for most organisations should be straight forward but that would miss the opportunity of leveraging the new features of this release.
Cluster Reply offer a full upgrade service that not only delivers the upgrade but also offers advice on how to maximise the value of the release.
For the last couple of years Cluster Reply has seen a huge growth in the desire of organisations to move some of its real estate to cloud. And the biggest growth in this area has been Hybrid Integration crossing between on-premises and cloud.
Release 2020 brings many improvements and updates that support this integration approach including:
As they say, this is the 6-million-dollar question! The good news is we have had over 20 years’ experience helping customers make the right decision so please contact us and we will come and help you make that decision and help you deliver a successful solution.