F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect vs. Microsoft BizTalk Server

I thought F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect worked great to bridge the gap between our gcp environment and on prem. We were lacking in cloud funtionality for native load balancers but XC really connected the dots. We would most likely need a hybrid environment until the irules functionality improves for a few of our apps but most could be migrated over the XC.

Incentivized

It is perfectly suited if some heavy operation needs to be automated where jobs can be queued up. Scalable app which is required to develop in a lesser time frame. Good for when users should be able to change rules more frequently without any downtime, like promotions. The server is well proven in the market. BizTalk server is the best fit if all other integration adapters are developed using Microsoft applications and if all applications are meant to be processed on a Windows environment.

Incentivized

• Ease of use - standing up a new site took very little time, less then an hour.
• Connecting the dots - the ease at standing up a load balancer and advertising it on CEs was simple and straight forward. Once you get familiar with the field layout it's very comparable to BIG-IP

Incentivized

• BizTalk uses Microsoft Visual Studio as the IDE (integrated development environment) tool, and it's very easy to use.
• The orchestration engine of BizTalk addresses resource issue very well for long-running business processes by dehydrating and rehydrating orchestration instances.
• BizTalk is very easy to integrate if the development is mainly on the Microsoft software family.

Incentivized

• More of a unified experience as Gartner released their latest sort of sassy trends. A lot of consumers are looking at a more unified experience and that's the sort of compilation of both management and data planes into a single things like single UI, easier management experience for the corporations.

Incentivized

• BizTalk needs to be better at tracking down errors after the fact. Input files by default get deleted after processing successfully, unless you specifically specify that they don't. This can be an issue where you need to see what the input file contained, since you may have errors showing up in your target platform, in our case this was SAP.
• BizTalk logging needs improved. It needs to be able to log the content of the messages it sends and receives. It would be good if the log had a link to the input and output files.
• BizTalk needs to allow a simple way to preserve the input and output files for debugging purposes. A master setting on the orchestration would be helpful for this.

Incentivized

At this point it has become too focal to our operations. An entire department could collapse if we dropped it now or in the near future. My experiences as mentioned in the previous questions tell of its gravity

Incentivized

BizTalk will always be required at this hospital.

Incentivized

Microsoft BizTalk is not an intuitive product. It requires many hours of looking through the settings to achieve what you need. Using 3rd party DLLs is a nightmare as you are forced to register them in the GAC of the server and this process is quite cumbersome just to use a DLL.

Incentivized

From what we have been able to test load/responsiveness is quick and when we've tested out reporting and troubleshooting modules they have pulled the correct information in quick timeframes. We haven't been able to test out any software integration with Splunk of other software on our system since we are still in early POC stages but from what we've been told we should be able to implement that in our environment

Incentivized

BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.

Incentivized

Make sure you have everybody and all depts. On board during testing on test server.

Incentivized

-F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect provides more granular security policies with features like DOS, WAF etc and others lack -F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect provides high performance global network and other rely on public internet and impact is latency and it gives F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect a better user experience

Incentivized

We did look at Jitterbit dataloader from Salesforce.com. Jitterbit seems like a pretty decent solution if you are doing a lot of uploads into Salesforce.com. However, its not nearly as flexible as Microsoft Biztalk is. Biztalk allows you to create any type of custom solution you wish, whereas Jitterbit is much more limited.

Incentivized

• Inconsistent policies and procedures and now its all seem to be sorted and now requires less support
• Deployment cycle time was reduced and achieves a faster adoption of newly added contents
• Saved migration cost and more gave durability to the existing setup

Incentivized

• Microsoft BizTalk is more of a neutral ground as its [pricey] but it does do what it says
• Microsoft BizTalk requires a much larger team of developers and server ops to run
• Microsoft BizTalk can be pricey depending on your agreement

Incentivized