XI & Biztalk - advantage & disadvantage

Question

What are the  advantage & disadvantage of XI & Biztalk ?
Which one is best solution as a middleware ?
Please provide in relavance to adapters IDOC etc..

Answer 1

Sap XI
       XI is well suited for connecting SAP systems with each other and with non-SAP. SAP XI provides an integrated workflow engine that allows defining adapters to non-XML protocols and mappings to convert data content from source to target format.
XI comes handy particularly incase of SAP - Non SAP interfaces where you can import standard integration content. Also XI has got sophisticated open standard adapter framework which is very easy to implement and custom logic can be implemented using Adapter module programming.
Advantages
Monitoring is better than any other middleware product. It offers exhaustive monitoring features like message, performance, component monitoring etc, all of which can be used to track and rectify the errors. It follows a hub and spoke model.
When you need to integrate with an SAP system XI has an advantage in supporting various SAP components and so on.
Process functionalities inside XI to modify content in the communication channel on own defined rules for business purposes.
Mappings and adapters are good as comparable with any other middleware product.
Synchronous & Asynchronous communication is possible.
  Dis-Advantages
Web methods are particularly good if u have B2B kind of communication with their Trading Partners product.
XI is lacking full-fledged Message Queue compared to other established Middleware products.
It lacks in ability to process huge messages but SAP is working on that.
It does not have a messaging layer exposed by APIs like IBM MQ-Series.
It is not comparable to Tibco in terms of speed.
SAP relies on other vendors except for a few adapters.
3. BizTalk
            BizTalk is a business process management (BPM) server that enables companies to automate and optimize business processes. This includes powerful, familiar tools to design, develop, deploy, and manage those processes.
            While planning for the integration scenario BizTalk takes care about tasks like Gathering information, Defining naming conventions, planning team development, setting up and working with source control.
Advantages
BizTalk 2004 is completely built on .Net.
Recoverable Interchange. In BizTalk, an Interchange can contain two or more messages, such as a batch. With the introduction of Recoverable Interchange in BizTalk Server 2006, only messages that fail validation are suspended, and the messages can be resumed after the error is corrected.
Failed message routing. New functionality is available to allow orchestration and send ports to subscribe to failed messages. When used appropriately, failed message routing can be used for notifying users of failed messages or building rich error handling and message repair capabilities.
Lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). BizTalk Server reduces the cost and complexity of automating and managing business processes with a single, unified solution for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi), and Business Process Management (BPM).
Enhanced productivity through integrated management and development tools.
Supports Computer Telephony Interface (CTI) through TAPI.
Dis-Advantages
Recovery is manual.
Backups are not automated.
Fault Tolerance capabilities are supported through other Microsoft products.
Repository only works with MS SQL.
Requires additional software to use certain features in BizTalk 2002, Microsoft Operations Manager & Application Center.
To use a server with 8-32 processors it requires Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter, which must be purchased through an OEM.
Only runs on Microsoft/Intel platform and only supports XML Data Reduced (XDR) not XML Schema Definition (XSD).
Edited by: chandra kanth. k on Jun 10, 2008 8:14 AM