Microsoft BizTalk will be rendered moot, here is why

Back in 2000, long before the cloud fuss start, Microsoft saw a market for integrating different systems together, it had to come with a solution to properly mash systems together in a controlled enviroment. Bang!, BizTalk was born and it was a success indeed. Over 8500 users are using this software since.

BizTalk wasn't easy to develop at all, If you have integrated systems before you will know how dirty it is. Why? Because you are not maintaining only your product, you are interfacing with others', so if one those systems went kinky for some reason your entire product will collapse. Plus, with each hot fix in these systems you have to patch your system as well to preserve the compatibility. So you can imagine how dirty it is for Microsoft to keep maintaining BizTalk. So if you are frustrated why BizTalk is not supporting Oracle 11g maybe now you have an idea why.

Ten years later, lots of other products were born including Azure AppFabric (Microsoft Cloud product) Microsoft found out that the features are being replicated between Azure and BizTalk. No wonder, because technically, and if I can phrase it right, BizTalk is nothing but a "private" cloud in an organization while AppFabric are a set of apps interconnected in a public cloud. Make AppFabric private and you get a BizTalk.

ESRI saw it before Microsoft did, they launched ArcGIS Online (cloud based mapping), they quickly scrapped their existing old ArcGIS portal and created Portal for ArcGIS fully based on ArcGIS Online.

So yes it might not be dead, yet, but I'll give it 5 years tops.

ZdNET guys agree as well.


EDIT:
Richard states a good point why BizTalk can be good for the short run. Read here.