BizTalk Services and Internet Service Bus Technologies

To benefit from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), businesses need to be able to rapidly build and deploy connected composite applications, applications that are composed of multiple disparate pieces, often abstracted as services. Initial efforts to build composite applications are often done in an expedient point-to-point fashion. As the composite applications grow and get more sophisticated, the limitations of an ad-hoc point-to-point integration approach become obvious. A more sustainable, loosely coupled approach is required. Consequently many organizations move to an application architecture built around a Service Bus.

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, that 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.

Enabling the Service Bus on the Internet

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.

Microsoft's Internet Service Bus Technologies

Here at BizTalk Labs we are providing early access to Internet Service Bus (ISB) capability, hosted on the Internet. The Microsoft ISB provides a next-generation platform technology for building composite applications, interconnecting disparate systems, and providing communications between endpoints, coordination of business processes, security for access control and data protection, as well as analysis and management of composite applications.

The current Microsoft ISB offering consists of these technologies:

• Hosted Building-Block Services: To interconnect systems across business units and partners.
• .NET Framework Extensions: To make connecting to the ISB simple and easy and to provide support for a wide range of Web programming capabilities.

The Microsoft Internet Service Bus technologies, next-generation platform infrastructure available today as a hosted service and in limited preview, brings new foundational capability to applications designers today. These technologies complement the existing deployments of Microsoft application platform technology such as Windows Server, the .NET Framework, and BizTalk Server.

Read more about the Microsoft ISB here.