For decades, my friends and I, along with many other integration professionals, worked in the trenches of integration, shaping the digital backbone of enterprises. From the heady days of EAI to the structured elegance of SOA, and the agile pragmatism of microservices, our quest has remained constant: how do we weave disparate capabilities into a cohesive, valuable whole?
We built the bridges, the highways, and the intricate railway networks of the digital world. Yet, let’s be honest—for all our sophistication, our orchestrations often felt like a meticulous, rigid dance.
Enter Agentic Orchestration. This isn’t just another buzzword. It’s a profound shift, an evolution that takes the core principles of SOA and infuses them with intelligence, dynamism, and a remarkable degree of autonomy. For the seasoned integration architect and engineer, this isn’t about replacing what we know—it’s about enhancing it, elevating it to a new plane of capability.
The Deterministic Dance of SOA Composites
Cast your mind back to the golden age of SOA. For those of us in the Microsoft ecosystem, this meant nearly two and a half decades with BizTalk Server—our workhorse, our battleground, our canvas. We diligently crafted composite services using orchestration designers, adapters, and pipelines. Others wielded BPEL and ESBs, but the principle was the same. Our logic was clear, explicit, and, crucially, deterministic.
If a business process required validating a customer, then checking inventory, and finally processing an order, we laid out that sequence with unwavering precision—whether in BizTalk’s visual orchestration designer or in BPEL code:
XML
<bpel:sequence name="OrderFulfillmentProcess"> <bpel:invoke operation="validateCustomer" partnerLink="CustomerService"/> <bpel:invoke operation="checkInventory" partnerLink="InventoryService"/> <bpel:invoke operation="processPayment" partnerLink="PaymentService"/></bpel:sequence>Those of us who spent years with BizTalk know this dance intimately: the Receive shapes, the Decision shapes, the carefully constructed correlation sets, the Scope shapes wrapped around every potentially fragile operation. We debugged orchestrations at 2 AM, optimized dehydration points, and became masters of the Box-Line-Polygon visual language.
This approach delivered immense value. It brought order to chaos, reused services, and provided a clear, auditable trail. However, its strength was also its weakness: rigidity. Any deviation or unforeseen circumstance required a developer to step in, modify the orchestration, and redeploy. The system couldn’t “think” its way around a problem—it merely executed a predefined script—a well-choreographed ballet, beautiful but utterly inflexible to improvisation.
The Rise of the Intelligent Collaborator: Agentic Orchestration
Now, imagine an orchestration that doesn’t just execute a script, but reasons. An orchestration where the “participants” are not passive services waiting for an instruction, but intelligent agents equipped with goals, memory, and a suite of “tools”—which, for us, are often our existing services and APIs.
This is the essence of agentic orchestration. It shifts from a predefined, top-down command structure to a more collaborative, goal-driven paradigm. Instead of meticulously charting every step, we define the desired outcome and empower intelligent agents to find the best path to it.
Think of it as moving from a detailed project plan (SOA) to giving a highly skilled project manager (the Orchestrator Agent) a clear objective and a team of specialists (worker agents, each with specific skills/tools).
Key Differences that Matter
From Fixed Sequence to Dynamic Planning:
- SOA: “Execute Step A, then Step B, then Step C.”
- Agentic: “Achieve Goal X. What tools do I have? Which one is best for this step? What’s my next logical action?” Agents dynamically construct their plan based on the current context and available resources.
From Explicit Error Handling to Self-Correction:
- SOA: We built elaborate try-catch blocks for every potential failure. In BizTalk, we wrapped Scope shapes around Scope shapes, each with its own exception handler.
- Agentic: If an agent tries a tool and it fails, it can reason why it failed, perhaps try a different tool, consult another agent, or even adjust its plan. This isn’t magic—it’s the underlying Large Language Model doing what it does best: problem-solving within constraints.
From API Contracts to Intent-Based Communication:
- SOA: Services communicate via strict, often verbose, XML or JSON contracts. We spent countless hours on schema design and message transformation.
- Agentic: Agents communicate intents. An “Order Fulfillment Agent” can tell a “Shipping Agent” in natural language (or a structured representation of intent), “Ship this package to customer X by date Y.” The Shipping Agent, understanding the intent, then uses its own tools (e.g., FedEx API, DHL API) to achieve that goal. The complexity of the underlying service calls is abstracted away.
From Static Connectors to Smart Tools:
- SOA: Connectors and adapters are fixed pathways requiring explicit configuration for each scenario. Remember configuring BizTalk adapters for each specific integration point?
- Agentic: Our existing APIs, databases, message queues, and even legacy systems become “tools” that agents can discover and wield intelligently. A Logic App connector to SAP is no longer just a connector—it’s a powerful SAP tool that an agent can learn to use when needed. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is making this discovery even more seamless.
A Concrete Example
Consider an order that fails the inventory check in our traditional BPEL or BizTalk orchestration. In SOA: hard stop, send error notification, await human intervention, and process redesign.
In an agentic system, the orchestrator agent might dynamically query alternate suppliers, adjust delivery timelines based on customer priority, suggest product substitutions, or even negotiate partial fulfillment—all without hardcoded logic for each scenario. The agent reasons about the business goal (fulfill the customer order) and uses available tools to achieve it, adapting to circumstances we never explicitly programmed for.
Azure Logic Apps: The Bridge to the Agentic Future
Azure Logic Apps demonstrates this evolution in practice, and it’s particularly compelling for integration professionals. For those of us coming from the BizTalk world, Logic Apps already felt familiar—the visual designer, the connectors, the enterprise reliability. Now, we’re not throwing away our decades of experience with these patterns. Instead, we’re adding an “intelligence layer” on top.
The Agent Loop within Logic Apps, with its “Think-Act-Reflect” cycle, transforms our familiar integration canvas into a dynamic decision-making engine. We can build multi-agent patterns—agent “handoffs” in which one agent completes a task and passes it to another, or “evaluator-optimizer” setups in which one agent generates a solution and another critiques and refines it.
All this, while leveraging the robust, enterprise-ready connectors we already depend on. Our existing investments in integration infrastructure don’t become obsolete—they become more powerful. The knowledge we gained from debugging BizTalk orchestrations, understanding message flows, and designing for reliability? All of that remains valuable. Micorsoft simply upgrading our toolkit.
The Path Forward: Embrace the Evolution
For integration engineers and architects, this is not a threat but an immense opportunity. We are uniquely positioned to lead this charge. We understand the nuances of enterprise systems, the criticality of data integrity, and the challenges of connecting disparate technologies. Those of us who survived the BizTalk years are battle-tested—we know what real-world integration demands.
Agentic orchestration frees us from the burden of explicit, step-by-step programming for every conceivable scenario. It allows us to design systems that are more resilient, more adaptive, and ultimately, more intelligent. It enables us to build solutions that don’t just execute business processes but actively participate in achieving business outcomes.
Start small: Identify one rigid orchestration in your current architecture that would benefit from adaptive decision-making. Perhaps it’s an order fulfillment process with too many exception handlers, or a customer onboarding workflow that breaks when regional requirements change. That’s your first candidate for agentic enhancement.
Let’s cast aside the notion of purely deterministic choreography. Let us instead embrace the era of intelligent collaboration, where our meticulously crafted services become the powerful tools in the hands of autonomous, reasoning agents.
The evolution is here. It’s time to orchestrate a smarter future.
Cloud Perspectives 