Friday Fact: Migrating BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Services will be expensive… but cheaper than other competitor

Last year at INTEGRATE 2023 and this year again at INTEGRATE 2024, I spoke on stage during my talks about Migrating from BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Services:

• It will be a complex and time-consuming task.
• You will need to innovate.

• And it will not be cheaper! But it’s definitely possible!

That particular sentence — “it will not be cheaper!” — surprised some people and, in many cases, led to misinterpretation. The word expensive itself can mean different things depending on the context, which likely contributed to the confusion. This reaction is understandable, especially because conference talks are short and don’t allow enough time to explore every nuance. For this reason, I decided to use this Friday Fact to clarify my message and explain the intended meaning more clearly.

By the end of this article, some of you may conclude that I’m actually describing the total cost of ownership when moving from BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Services. You may be right. Still, I prefer simple language. From my perspective, this represents the overall migration cost of any environment, system, or platform — and it’s something every organization must evaluate carefully. When I bought my house, I didn’t focus solely on the price quoted by the contractor. Instead, I also considered taxes, legal costs, and the additional investments needed to turn the house into what I had envisioned.

Migrating BizTalk Server to a new version of BizTalk Server: The Untold Story

First, let’s clarify a few facts about BizTalk migrations. Migrating an old BizTalk Server environment to another BizTalk Server environment—ideally to the latest version—is expensive. It is not a cheap task. Several factors contribute to this cost, and the following points explain why:

• Upfront investment: Consider that you will not do an in-place migration, which is often too risky because it can impact the business. You need to buy new BizTalk Server licenses.
  • The company can easily spend 100K in BizTalk Server licenses for a decent environment.
  • On top of that, you need to include an SQL Server license and a Windows Server license.
  • It also needs to pay for the hardware, usually, these days, virtual machines.
• Development: Consider that we usually migrate solutions AS-IS with only minor modifications. This is undoubtedly the smallest portion of the expense, since migrating solutions to a new environment is fairly easy in BizTalk Server. Depending on the number of solutions, this usually takes days or a few weeks.
• Test and Acceptance tests: Test and acceptance phases are where things usually go wrong. If you’re lucky and the IT team can handle the migration without involving the business—which occasionally happens—this phase remains relatively simple. However, once the business must participate, the situation quickly becomes more complex. In those cases, testing can take days, weeks, or even months. The timeline depends on the number of teams involved, the complexity of acceptance tests, and overall team availability.
  • What people tend to forget is that involving all these people also brings costs to the company. Costs that need/should be imputed to environmental migration.

Migrating BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Story: The Correct Story

Now that it’s clear that migrating an old BizTalk Server environment to a newer version is far from cheap—and acknowledging that cheap and expensive mean different things to different people—it’s fair to ask an important question: will migrating BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Services be simple or inexpensive?

The answer depends heavily on your existing BizTalk footprint and the integrations and features your solution relies on. Still, for the sake of this discussion, I’ll focus on a typical scenario with average usage and common integration patterns.

One positive aspect of this migration journey is the lack of upfront investment. When approached wisely, the move to Azure Integration Services allows organizations to avoid high initial costs and instead adopt a more gradual, consumption‑based model.

• Notice that I added “if you are smart” because sometimes I see clients, from day one, starting to create premium services like Service Bus, API Management, and a bunch of other services they do not need yet. Just because they are thinking about using it or will use it at the end is an upfront investment for me. If you start small and get bigger, for example, by creating a Service Bus standard, and when you reach the point where you need the premium, go for it, and you will save money.

But if we don’t need upfront investment anymore, why is this migration process also, or can it somehow become, expensive?

The reasons are very simple:

• Development: That task will have a particular weight in the migration budget, and the reasons are:
  • There is no magic button to migrate a BizTalk Server solution to Azure. Microsoft is closing the GAP and simplifying the process daily, but there is no one-to-one match of BizTalk Server features and capabilities with Azure Integration Services.
    • Some features do not exist; some have a direct match; others have many options.
    • Depending on company policies:
      • You may be forced to choose a first- or low-code/no-code approach.
      • You may or may not be forced to use premium services.
      • You may or may not be compelled to use services under VNET.
  • Many of the BizTalk Server applications have been running for years and were created many years ago, so it is normal that you will find that:
    • There will not be any proper documentation explaining the business processes and rules.
    • The people behind the applications that drive their creations have already moved on. They may no longer be with the company or hold other positions.
    • There is no source code anymore.
  • You must first assess your BizTalk Server environment and applications. This step requires a deep understanding of what exists today and careful planning for the migration. Planning should not focus only on deadlines but also on the Azure services you intend to use. In many cases, teams discover that several integration processes are already deprecated without anyone realizing it. As a result, you often need to involve the business to validate, review, and approve these findings. This involvement inevitably increases manpower and overall migration costs.
  • You need to prepare the Azure foundations before you jump to the application migrations.
  • Azure has a rapid release update cadence, so you must follow up by upgrading/migrating existing services to new versions or features.
  • And you simply cannot migrate a BizTalk Server application AS IS. You need to innovate your BizTalk application to run on Azure – even if they have the same business logic.
• Test and Acceptance tests: Here, for me, will be the most complex part, carrying significant weight in the budget. In BizTalk Server, in some cases, there was no need to involve the business in test and acceptance. Here, that will not happen. This application needs to be tested correctly and extensible before it goes live. That means:
  • We need to involve all teams in this process, and again, this can take several days, weeks, or months, depending on the teams involved, the complexity of the acceptance test, and team availability. All of these are COSTS for the company.

BUT… I’M NOT SAYING MIGRATING TO AZURE INTEGRATION SERVICES IS MORE EXPENSIVE OR LESS EXPENSIVE THAN MIGRATING OR CONTINUING IN BIZTALK SERVER.

I’m not comparing the cost of both migrations. I’m just saying that in the migration journey, you cannot only look at the cost of the technologies. You have to look at all the layers:

• Technology cost.
• Developing costs: Azure developers are typically less expensive than BizTalk Server developers.
• Assessment phase costs.
• Testing phase costs.
• Costs of involving external teams.
• And so on.

That’s why I’m saying that you have to make a significant investment. But it is also important to consider the return on investment (ROI) when discussing costs, and here I do believe you will have a faster ROI than migrating to a new version of BizTalk Server, for example.

Can competitors offer a better story?

No — don’t believe that. I often hear customers say that a salesperson, a BizTalk expert, or another cloud integration vendor promised them an easy AS‑IS migration of their BizTalk Server applications. They are also told it will be cheaper. That message is misleading.

Stop buying that story, because it simply isn’t true. In most cases, these vendors can’t even migrate a simple BizTalk map AS‑IS, let alone an entire application end‑to‑end. When that’s the situation, you really need to question how they plan to deliver the full solution.

If you ever find yourself in that position, ask them the following questions:

• For a proof-of-concept without cost to you. To see and understand how they can do those migrations.
• And ask them for clear evidence and case studies comparing the costs of migrating a BizTalk Server environment to their services with Azure Integration Services or with BizTalk Server itself.

Ultimately, you will realize that Azure Integration Service is the simple and most cost-effective path to migrating a BizTalk Server environment. Because there is already a lot of parity between BizTalk Server and Azure Integration Services, and we can still use/migrate some components AS IS.

Disclaimer: The sentences and opinions presented in this Friday Fact are my personal opinions supported by my experience on BizTalk Server and Azure Integration Services, based on the reality I encounter in the clients and the facts I mention in this blog post.

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