What’s the ROI after purchasing BizTalk360?

Published on : May 5, 2022

Category : BizTalk Server

Christhini

Author

During demos of BizTalk360, we often receive good feedback about how useful the product is for BizTalk administrators. In this blog however, we want to explain how BizTalk360 also helps with:

  • Reaching higher availability of the BizTalk platform
  • Better involvement of end-users of the integrations
  • Improved IT support processes

Simplified day-to-day operations

The all-in-one portal concept in BizTalk360 makes it easy to access all the tools BizTalk administrators need for their day-to-day activities. With its team management features, BizTalk360 enables you to provide technical as well as non-technical personnel safe and audited access to the BizTalk environment.

Automated monitoring and notification

Simplified day-to-day operations

BizTalk administrators spend a lot of time switching between different environments and tools. Tools that are used daily include the BizTalk Administrator Console, SQL Server Management Studio, Windows Event Viewer, Windows Performance Monitor, etc. With BizTalk360, however, you have the relevant capabilities of those tools at hand in a single web interface. This makes it easy to switch between environments, as well as navigating between those tools.

Automated monitoring and notification

Customer’s ROI: As an average, it takes 2 mins to login to each server and get it into the required console. With BizTalk360, you may save half of the time because of its one portal concept.

Involve the IT Helpdesk in the daily operations

With BizTalk360, you can offload work from your BizTalk administrators by onboarding the IT Helpdesk. Often the IT Helpdesk has an early start of the business day, and they will be the first ones that are contacted in case of anything unexpected happening. Instead of having them reaching out to the BizTalk administrators, why not involve them in the support process. By giving them read-only access, they can check what all is happening in the environment, without exposing confidential information, like message content and context.

Customer’s ROI: Improve the overall support process, by giving safe and audited BizTalk environment access to support engineers.

Self-service portals for end-users

End users of integrations are interested in understanding whether their integrations are working properly, but they do not have a lot of BizTalk expertise. You do not want to rant those users access to the BizTalk administration console.
BizTalk360 has multiple dashboards and portals that are beneficial for end-users. By providing your end-users access to those portals, they can check the state of their integrations without having to contact the BizTalk administrators.

Customer’s ROI: The BizTalk360 Self-service portals for end-users help in keeping the overview of the processing of your business transactions.

Give BizTalk Devs read-only access to the Live env for troubleshooting and analysis

It is not uncommon, that after a new integration has been deployed, bugs are found in the integration. For ease of analysis and troubleshooting, you’ll want to give BizTalk developers limited and read-only access to the environment. With BizTalk360, this is a breeze. You can simply create a profile for BizTalk developers and assign that to the required person(s).

Customer’s ROI: Improve troubleshooting and resolution timelines by providing safe and audited access to BizTalk developers.

Less manual monitoring and more productive administrators

Monitoring your BizTalk environment can be very time-consuming, as you manually need to do it, multiple times per day. Once you have set up monitoring in BizTalk360, you will be made aware of anything unexpected happening automatically. This will give you the comfortable feeling that you are on top of the health of the environment. At the same time, your BizTalk administrators can work on more productive tasks than manually monitor the environment.

Customer’s ROI: After setting up monitoring in BizTalk360, your BizTalk administrators can spend their time on more useful work than manual monitoring.

Receive automated Daily check reports

Typically, the first job at the beginning of the business day, is to check if your BizTalk environment is healthy. Depending on the size of the environment, such checks can take from only a couple of minutes to more than an hour. With BizTalk360, you can use Health Check Notification alarms for your daily checks or other periodic checks. Let’s consider an example:

’Say, you want to receive an alarm every weekday (Mon – Fri), at 9AM, irrespective of the artifact’s status/health. In such cases, a health check notification will be extremely helpful. Read the article to know more about how you can create alarms.

Customer’s ROI: Reduce the time being spent on daily, and other periodic, checks.

Receive Notifications via the products you are already using

Typically, after BizTalk360 has been introduced, mainly BizTalk administrators will receive notification of anything unexpected happening. However, other stakeholders can also automatically receive notifications of unexpected situations. Those notifications can contain error information and (optionally) even BizTalk messages and are transmitted via so-called notification channels. BizTalk360 offers custom notification channels for the following:

  • Microsoft Teams – Push notifications to relevant teams
  • Slack – Push notifications to selected channels
  • ServiceNow – Automatically create tickets with the error information
  • PowerShell – Trigger actions based on unexpected events
  • SMTP – Send mails to relevant people email box
  • WebHook – Send notifications to webservices

To know more, follow the steps to configure custom notification channels in BizTalk360.

Customer’s ROI: Business users become aware of unexpected events when they happen in the products that they are already using.

Improve service availability with automated recovery options

With BizTalk360, monitoring goes further than just sending notifications in case of unexpected events. The product has automated recovery options for the following state–based components.

  • BizTalk Server – Ports, Orchestrations, Host Instances
  • SQL Server – SQL jobs
  • Microsoft Windows – NT services
  • Microsoft Azure – Logic Apps, API apps

Stakeholders can also take automated action against broken transactions, such as Suspend, Resume and Terminate. Follow this article to know more about the feature.

Customer’s ROI: Due to the automated recovery options, the number of tickets can be hugely reduced, and less support effort will be required to solve issues. As a result of those recovery options, the availability of the BizTalk platform will be better.

Benefits of using BizTalk360

Here are some of the benefits that our customers gave us feedback on, in the past 10 years:

  1. Faster issue troubleshooting
  2. Everything in one console
  3. Safe and audited access
  4. Receiving notifications of
    • Artifacts being in the wrong state
    • Not occurring expected workload
  5. Monitoring error code and automatically notifying the right team
  6. Self-service portals for non-BizTalk administrators
  7. Higher availability of the BizTalk platform

Customer FAQ’S

  1. Do you provide services for the installation and configurations?

Once the customer purchases the product, we never leave them alone. We start with helping them to set up the product via a screen sharing session. Further, we have regular sync-up calls with our customers and see if everything goes as expected. Also, we check with them if they are using the tool to the fullest.

    1. Do I need to buy a separate license for production and non-production environment? Or can I get one license and use it in both environments?

Yes, you need to purchase separate licenses for a non-production environment at a very subsidized cost. 

      1. Do you have any whitepapers that shed light on the quantifiable benefits of BizTalk360?

Yes, we do have a whitepaper from Microsoft. You can Download it from here.

      1. Would my company’s super users require an MSDN subscription to resolve issues with suspended instances?

Once you have purchased BizTalk360 license, in BizTalk360 you need to create super and custom users to access suspended instances. This means they do not need MSDN licenses.

      1. Do you see your tool as a way to distribute management tasks to users with less IT experience?

Yes, BizTalk360 is designed in such a way that you can bring your business users, who might have less IT experience, to access your BizTalk environment.

      1. How many hours per week does it take to administer BizTalk360 on average?

Customers need to familiarize themselves with the product and do the installation and prerequisite. Our team regularly gets in touch with the customers to ensure their BizTalk360 is working fine and that they maximize the use of the product.

Roadmap

During its introduction in 2011, we have brought 3 to 4 releases of BizTalk360 per year. Even now, we keep on bringing new releases at that pace. Many features and improvements that we release are based on customer feedback,

Our team is planning for the next release of BizTalk360, in late June 2022. We are producing lots of new features and enhancements in that release. Check the article to know more about the upcoming release.

BizTalk Job portal

This is something that our team has picked up. We want to support the people who have invested their time in searching for jobs in the BizTalk Server space. This portal is exclusively developed by the BizTalk360 team. It connects BizTalk Server professionals and recruiters around the globe. Via the portal, you get instant updates when a recruiter posts an open BizTalk position. Easily track your applications on your dashboard.

Migrating to BizTalk Server 2020 – Book

We see our end customers facing issues when migrating from earlier versions of BizTalk Server to the current BizTalk Server 2020. Hence, this book will be a life saver and titled as “Migrating to BizTalk Server 2020”. This is readily available online.

BizTalk Server Training

We do conduct training every month on BizTalk Server 2020 on several topics like:

      • BizTalk Server Hybrid options
      • BizTalk Server Development and
      • BizTalk Server Administration

If you are a BizTalk user, then this training will be extremely useful. If you want to attend the sessions, please register via the link.

Conclusion

In this blog, we explained how organizations can benefit of BizTalk360. We are always happy to discuss any challenges you may be facing, so please feel free to reach out to us and have an obligation-free conversation. You can request a demo or take a free trial.