Research firm Gartner consider Microsoft's offering one of their 'Leaders' for Application Integration Suites.

The additional functionality can be delivered by .NET assemblies that can be called from existing modules—including, for instance, orchestrations, maps, pipelines, business rules.

[citation needed] The BizTalk Server runtime is built on a publish/subscribe architecture, sometimes called "content-based publish/subscribe".

BizTalk uses adapters for communications with different protocols, message formats, and specific software products.

It includes: WCF-WSHttp, WCF-BasicHttp, WCF-NetTcp, WCF-NetMsmq, WCF-NetNamedPipe, WCF-Custom, WCF-CustomIsolated adapters.

Additional adapters[19] (for Active Directory, for example) are available from third party Microsoft BizTalk core partners.