Our enterprise is implementing a business application for sports vertical (stadium and event and facility management) wherein CRM would be there for sales and campaign, event management system would be there for managing sporting events, MS Dynamics AX ERP would be there for accounting and HR purposes, sharepoint portal would be there for public users (registration, ticketing, booking etc).
Now-a-days most of the products from microsoft are capable of exposing services. For example MS Dynamics CRM expose a web service endpoint which can be leveraged by creating strongly typed proxies at the client side. MS Dynamics AX has AIF module (Application Integration Framework module) on top of which a service layer could be built.
So is BizTalk absolutely necessary (other than any complex transformations and/or validations) if we are finally going to deal with only WCF services to communicate. As far as reading flat files are considered (for ERP systems) that could be as well done using SSIS.
We fully understand the benefits of having an integration service bus instead of point to point communication. But only this logic is not suffiecient for us to make a strong business case for purchasing BizTalk licenses.
I request the MVPs to provide me strong justifications such that we can go to CTO for approval of purchasing enterprise licenses for BizTalk Server 2010.
Note: We do not have any mainframe systems to integrate with.
Please mark as answer if this helps you. Thanks and warm regards Ambar Ray Solution Architect - Microsoft Technologies