Technical drivers

The primary technical goal for BizTalk Services is to reduce the impedance mismatch between source and destination systems that are exchanging information. Such impedance can be at different levels:

• Transport protocol impedance: The source might send messages over one transport (say FTP) and the destination may only accept messages over another transport (say POP3). It could also be the case that messages are sent from one LOB to another, for example, one end is sending messages from the Sales Force adapter while the other end is accepting messages via the SAP adapter. BizTalk Services provides the notion of adapters to resolve this impedance.

• Application protocol impedance: The source might send EDIFACT messages while the destination may only accept messages in XML. BizTalk Services provides native support to protocols such as X12, EDIFACT, and flat files to resolve this impedance.

• Format impedance: The source might send messages in one XML format while the destination may only accept messages in another XML format. BizTalk Services provides transforms to resolve this impedance.

• Timing impedance: The source can send messages any time of the day, but the destination only accepts messages between 4 and 7 P.M. The source can send messages twice as fast as the destination can process them.

• Size impedance: The source can send messages of any size, but the destination can accept messages of 1 MB at most.

BizTalk Services provides connectivity to Service Bus, batching and debatching to resolve the last two impedances.