INTEGRATE2018–The Microsoft Integration Platform

Starting the line of sessions at INEGRATE2018 is Jon Fancey with “The Microsoft Integration platform”. He spent the first half of his session talking about digital transformation, the speed of change, disruption and innovation. Since it’s a keynote type of session, its kind of broad and I expect establishes a baseline to build upon. He emphasized the importance of changing, and being the one that initiate the change. He also mentioned how Microsoft works with customers, ISV, partners and community to help with that.

Matthew Fortunka, Head of Development for Car Buying and Confused.com was brought on to showcase how the technology available had been used to transform the way they do their IT.
Confused is one of the leading car insurance companies in the uk. When they started moving to Azure infrastructure it was a lot about IaaS.

Their next step was building a cloud native version of the application.

They were initially “skeptical” about using Logic Apps, but they soon found benefits with the visual designer, the speed of creating something with it and the possibility to communicate to product owners and other developer around it. They are now also looking at expanding into Functions and API-M.

“Without the technology none of the rest of the company would exist”.

After listening to Matthew, Microsoft continued and more people from the team joined through several demos to showcase a lot of technologies working together to form a complete Microsoft Integration platform.

We also saw use of the Integration service Environment (ISE) that allows you to run your private environment, private stamp, of the Logic app integration capabilities (now available in private preview).

Another nugget in this presentation was the use of the SAP connector through the on-premise gateway using a trigger. The trigger was webhook based and the address of the webhook was registered on the gateway. So no more of that pesky polling that can highly affect your Logic App costs and gains if you need to poll often.

Johan Hedberg comments: Microsoft are doing a lot of cool things within the integration sphere. Most notably the messaging, serverless and iPaaS space has brought on a whole new set of tooling over the last couple of years. And even BizTalk Server has seen a rejuvenation. But, it (BizTalk) is also a product that has stayed the same for a long time. Stability is actually one of it’s key strengths. It’s also made it possible for a large group of people to reach a reasonable level of experience of creating great customer solutions using it. It will be interesting to see during the rest of the conference what change or disruption Microsoft will continue to bring or announce as the conference continues. From a high level, moving from infrastructure, managing servers yourself, to pay-as-you-go cloud services, with the possibility to easily add more, start small and build as you go allows a completely different approach to how to onboard new technology.. Adding things as you are ready, with an initial cost of next to nothing, and a speed that compared to having to create your own infrastructure for it is amazing. That is disruptive. But it’s not really new any more. From a technology standpoint. But. It is still new for a lot of companies out there. And it is an amazing possibility change for them. At the same time, the demos showed and highlighted that it’s not and either or. You can use the new technologies to extend and expand on your current integration solutions. Over time I believe the cloud is the way to go, anything else seems unlikely, but today – you do not have to go all in, nor do you have to choose. Use both. Make it work for you, the way you want. You’re in control.