What is Business Process

When we demo Atomic Scope to our potential customers, one of the frequently asked questions is “What is a Business Process and how it relates to integration service components?”. Answering this question is vital as pricing of Atomic Scope depends on it and In this small writeup, we will try to address this question.

Business Process

Nowadays we see three different types of integration solutions.
On-premises only Solutions: These solutions typically make use of BizTalk server on-premises connecting to various applications and customers.
Azure only solutions: These solutions make use of Azure integration services such as logic apps, service bus queues, event grid, APIM, event grid, etc.
Hybrid integration solutions: These solutions make use of both Azure integration solutions and BizTalk server on premises.
Consider an example of a logistical company ShipAnyWhere; it will have many integrations with the carriers. These interactions can be Booking Request, Booking Confirmation, Shipping Instructions, Milestone Status etc. All these transactions come together and form a Logistics Business process for Ship Anywhere.
The picture below shows logical grouping of transactions into a Logistics Business Process.

In Atomic Scope, the business process can be modeled exactly the way depicted in the picture above. Picture below shows Atomic Scope configuration for ShipAnyWhere Logistics business process.

Frequently asked questions on Business process

1. Can I onboard an unlimited number of customers on a single business process?

   Yes . You can onboard an unlimited number of customers or trading partners under same business process. The customer name or Trading partner name will just be one of the tracked field in those transactions.  
   

2. Is the pricing for production and UAT/Dev is same?

   No. For non-production and dev it is a flat price of $100/ month. The non-production licenses will have no restriction on number of business processes.  
   

3. I have multiple send ports for each of the trading partner, but all them process same business transaction. Can I bring all of them into same transaction?

   Yes . As a transaction name can be mapped to transaction name in configuration, you can bring multiple receive locations, orchestrations or send ports into single transaction.  
   

4. Can I bring different ports from different BizTalk applications into same business process ?

   Yes, Since its just the mapping between the names you configure , it is possible to bring processing elements from different  biztalk applications.  
   

5. Can the same AtomicScope server be used to manage Business Process for PROD as well as UAT as long as they are within the limit

   Technically yes. However, to preserve the integrity of production data, we recommend customers to have different instances.