With more than 20 people from the different Microsoft product teams and 25 speakers, this is the biggest event to remain up-to-date with the latest evolutions in the integration space.  After this successful edition, it’s time to look back at the most important announcements!

Azure Integration Services

The announcement of Azure Integration Services is probably one of the biggest evolutions that is going on.  Azure Integration Services is the umbrella for Logic Apps, API Management, Service Bus and Event Grid.  It’s clear that this is more than a marketing effort.  The final goal is to ensure seamless integration and collaboration between these separate services and to provide one uniform integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS).

This will be achieved by designing detailled reference architectures, by developing quick-start templates that solve common integration challenges and by designing best practices about CI/CD, disaster recovery and scalability.

Integration Service Environments

The roadmap of Azure Logic Apps was presented, including lots of new features.  The most important one is definitely the introduction of an Integration Service Environment (ISE).  This gives you the ability to run Logic Apps on dedicated and isolated compute power, including a way to connect to on-premise application through VNET integration.  An ISE will come with a fixed price per 50M actions.  At the time of writing, there are no more details available on the pricing, but it’s obvious that dedicate compute comes with a higher price.

Next to that, there was the announcement that the Integration Account will get a consumption based billing model, which is great news for many of our customers.  Other features that will be released later this year are: availability of Logic Apps in China cloud, beter testing/mocking capabilities, support for OAuth2 on HTTP trigger, extended support for Managed Service Identity and Key Vault.  And yes… the trigger for the SAP connector is now in private preview!

The future of BizTalk Server

Microsoft announced the third Feature Pack for BizTalk Server, with a main focus on compliance (GDPR), advanced scheduling and Office365 adapters.  It’s clear that Microsoft is fully betting on Azure Integration Services and that more and more BizTalk functionalities will move to the cloud.  Next to that, there’s also the trend that Logic Apps gets more and more positioned for on premises integration.  Via an ISE, this will become already easier and Logic Apps will also be made available on Azure Stack.

Our existing BizTalk Server customers don’t need to be concerned.  Microsoft is aware of its extended customer base that runs business critical processes on top of BizTalk Server.  BizTalk Server will be maintained at least until there is a valid alternative available on-premises.  Be aware that extended support for the current BizTalk version (2016) is still available until 2027.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch, if you need more information!