Why migrate from SeeBeyond to BizTalk?

Migrating from a large EAI platform to another is always a tough decision and cannot be made in vacuum. Whatever EAI platform an enterprise has in place forms the backbone of their enterprise when it comes to their data communication needs. The EAI platform is what one would analogously consider the “plumbing” of a house. If the plumbing fails, the house is unlivable and alternate arrangements have to be made.

Given the business criticality of an EAI solution, it is essential for an enterprise to choose a tool that is scalable, robust, extensible and most importantly maintainable. Typically these are qualities one would look in any software tool, but nowhere are they more important then in an EAI tool.

Historically, the problem with EAI tools in the enterprise space has been their lack of ability to continue to evolve to the new standards and advancements in technology and also the ability to scale with the growing demands of business. The tools that did manage to provide patches to the tools for such advances were usually “kludgey” solutions that were not truly integrated with the tool. Given these challenges that are bound to occur with any EAI tool now or in the future, it is prudent to move with a tool that is supported by a financially stable company which will be there for the long haul and has the deep pockets to support the advancements in technology. The reasons discussed about inability to evolve and scale has plagued the EAI industry until now because typically all EAI vendors have been small companies with their own agendas dictated more by wall street than the needs of their customers and as a result virtually all the key players have either almost vanished (Vitria) or have been acquired by larger corporations to fill a niche in their overall solution portfolio (SeeBeyond being purchased by Sun is a prime example) when the focus of the company may not be EAI.

Biztalk is one of the few tools that has grown internally within Microsoft and has been nurtured over the past few years for it to mature and achieve enterprise status. It is supported by the most financially stable software corporation on the planet and has the deep pockets and resources to keep evolving BizTalk to the ever changing needs.

Regardless of what tool an enterprise may be utilizing currently, chances are the enterprise will hit a point where the tool is unable to evolve or scale as needed and the sooner an enterprise makes a decision to move with an industry leader, the safer its investment in time, resources and money will be.

Having discussed some benefits of moving to BizTalk as a tool for choice, here are some points to consider why it is beneficial to move away from other EAI tools such as SeeBeyond.

· Expensive to maintain and increases TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

· Is no longer a market leader in EAI tools and will eventually phase out and disappear where components are cannibalized and utilized in the J2EE frameworks from Sun

· Product is not backwards compatible with older versions

· Lack of backward and forwards compatibility requires constant re-tooling of team

· Upgrade in SeeBeyond is resource intensive and time consuming

· Takes longer to make changes to functionality