Modernizing integration landscapes: Insights from PZEM and Cegeka's BizTalk to Azure migration

Cegeka’s tailored solutions

Jeroen Maes, Enterprise Architect at Cegeka, kicked off by outlining the company's extensive integration services and discussing how these were fine-tuned to PZEM’s unique requirements.

Cegeka approached this project as they approach every project, starting with a comprehensive assessment to evaluate the existing landscape, anticipate challenges and identify the potential benefits of the redesign. Cegeka's vendor-agnostic approach allows to offer multiple integration solutions from both industry leaders and open-source projects, which was ideal for PZEM who needed a solution to work with their existing environment strategy. Cegeka’s flexible deployment models, ranging from cloud-only iPaaS to hybrid and on-premises solutions, meant that PZEM could choose the optimal setup for their needs.

Jeroen Maes also highlighted Cegeka's use of standardized integration landing zones, which ensure secure and efficient platform environments. The company has developed a collection of reusable components, known as integration accelerators, built from past projects to speed up deployments. Additionally, Cegeka places a strong emphasis on monitoring and observability, implementing both technical and business activity monitoring for comprehensive oversight. This provided PZEM with real-time insights into their integration processes, enabling quick identification and resolution of issues, and allowing the business to make data-driven decisions based on accurate, up-to-date information.

Migrating to a new platform is just the beginning of the modernization journey, as Jeroen Maes explains. "At Cegeka we see this as only the first stage. We tend to take the opportunity to introduce a full event-driven and API-led architecture when designing such a new platform, and for a lot of projects this paves the way to a wider modernization road map."

PZEM's migration journey

Erwin de Kam, Enterprise Architect at PZEM, went on to discuss their experience of the migration. Faced with an aging BizTalk platform that was approaching end-of-life, scalability issues, and the need for a future-proof solution, PZEM chose to explore AIS due to their cloud-first and Microsoft-centric strategy.

The company partnered with Cegeka for a pilot migration of ten integrations, opting for a manual approach over using migration tools for better long-term maintainability. The full-scale migration, involving around 180 interfaces, presented some initial challenges. When starting the migrations, we encountered some issues that we had to tackle,” recalled Erwin de Kam. These included misalignment between the agile methodology of the AIS team and the change-based approach of the infrastructure team, lack of dedicated key personnel, and the need to build up PZEM-specific components.

"The close collaboration between the infrastructure team, the implementation team, the maintenance team, and the business itself was key to the speed of the transition from BizTalk to AIS and to the success of the project overall," Erwin de Kam concluded.

Cegeka's structured migration methodology

The webinar concluded with a run-down of Cegeka’s carefully structured migration methodology from Jeroen Maes. “We always have to start with an assessment,” he explained. “We perform a feasibility check that evaluates the possibilities of the future approach. Then we perform a small pilot and start working on planning a road map for the full migration.”

Next comes a study phase where a set of workshops aims to discover the technical and functional needs of the customer before the design and development phase can begin. “The deployment of the landing zone then follows, to establish the correct base layer of the platform,” Jeroen Maes continued. “We then have a checkpoint where we look back at the assessment again. This is very important because it allows us to validate the performance and capabilities of the new integration platform.”

Finally, it’s time to start the migration of the integration implementations. Jeroen Maes explained that Cegeka tends to run the old and the new platforms side-by-side to validate the outcome. “During deployments we pay a lot of attention to monitoring, and only when we are satisfied do we start the process of migrating all the integrations in bulk."

Conclusions