Where does BizTalk fit into the Enterprise?

This is an important question that bears answering. For all its glory, BizTalk is not a panacea for the enterprise. It is not an ERP or human workflow system, nor is it an accounting, claims management, or inventory management system. In fact, out of the box, BizTalk inherently does nothing. BizTalk's value is connecting these types of systems within your enterprise and with your trade partners. BizTalk is ultimately middleware, used to bridge these disparate systems and replace costly, tightly coupled, point to point integrations with an ESB or hub and spoke architecture, that is able to deliver more value as a whole than the constituent parts individually. BizTalk enables business processing to happen faster, more easily, and more reliably. BizTalk empowers your enterprise to leverage existing assets and interact with the larger world of software more easily. In some organizations, this will make it a core and central part of the enterprise architecture. In other organizations, BizTalk may serve more of an edge role, bridging the gap between external trade partners or legacy systems. Either way it is important to find where BizTalk fits for you and I invite you to start small, convince yourself, and iteratively build up and out to find the right place for BizTalk.