INTEGRATE 2025, the Largest Microsoft Integration Tech Conference

On 9 & 10 June 2025, INTEGRATE 2025, the Largest Microsoft Integration Tech Conference was held in London. I attended this conference remotely.

This year was the 13th anniversary of INTEGRATE and there were about 290 people in the live audience and some 200+ following the sessions remotely. There were about 36 speakers and 28 topics.

The event is organized by the Kovai.co Event Team. This year, it was the first time that there were 2 parallel tracks in a particular timeslot, to give attendees more choice.

In this article, I gathered some practical information about the event, and the sessions that were held. Perhaps this gives you more insight in what you can expect from such an event and it may help you in deciding if, as it was for me, such an event is an opportunity for you to gather/share information. For me, this was the third INTEGRATE event, I attended.

For more information, please see: https://turbo360.com/events/integrate-2025/

INTEGRATE 2025

Over 12 years, INTEGRATE has been the premier gathering that unites a niche group of Azure enthusiasts, Microsoft Product Groups and Industry leaders to connect, ignite ideas, and drive growth.

A global ecosystem of C-levels, decision-makers, and integration experts,building lasting connections that fuel your career.
_{[https://turbo360.com/events/integrate-2025/]}

Again Microsoft was a great partner for INTEGRATE 2025, as was the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) community!

Tickets

With regard to tickets, the following options were available:

• Remote (Online Networking):  €525
• Live (Full Access):  €1525

There was also a special discount for Alumni available. So, I received and used a coupon code and got a special 20% discount.

Schedule (9 June 2025)

Here you can see the schedule for the first day:

Time	Topic	Speaker(s)	Organisation
09:15 AM – 09:45 AM	Welcome speech	Saravana Kumar	Kovai.co
09:45 AM – 10:45 AM	Keynote	Balan Subramanian Slava Koltovich	Microsoft
10:45 AM – 11:10 AM	Break and Networking	–	–
11:10 AM – 12:10 PM	What’s new in Azure Logic Apps	Kent Weare Parth Shah	Microsoft
	Why is no-one talking about Real-Time Intelligence?	Martin Abbott	Evolytica
12:10 PM – 01:00 PM	How are we going to support all of this AI and Integration stuff?	Michael Stephenson	Turbo360
	EDI (AS2, X12 & EDIFact) with Azure Logic Apps Standard & API Management	Bill Chesnut	SixPivot
01:00 PM – 02:00 PM	Lunch	–	–
02:00 PM – 03:00 PM	Real-time event streaming ingestion and processing with Fabric	Kevin Lam Alicia Li	Microsoft
	Transforming BizTalk: A journey to modern integration	Jay Schmelzer Harold Campos	Microsoft
03:00 PM – 03:50 PM	Building a comprehensive Logic App & Custom Actions Workflow solution with the latest best practices	Mick Badran	SolveIT.Today
	Building agentic workflows using Azure Logic Apps	Kent Weare Divya Swarnkar	Microsoft
03:50 PM – 04:15 PM	Break and Networking	–	–
04:15 PM – 05:15 PM	Getting started with AI for Integration	Stephen W Thomas	Kendall Technologies
	Integration development challenges in a Cloud PaaS world	Mattias Lögdberg	DevUP Solutions
05:15 PM – 06:00 PM	Messaging for the enterprise	Christina Compy Eldert Grootenboer	Microsoft
	Seamless SAP Integration with Azure Logic Apps	Sebastion Meyer	QUIBIQ
06.00 PM – 08.00 PM	Drinks and Networking	–	–

_{[https://turbo360.com/events/integrate-2025/]}

Schedule (10 June 2025)

Here you can see the schedule for the second day:

Time	Subject	Speaker(s)	Organisation
08:30 AM – 09:30 AM	Enhancing Developer Efficiency with Logic Apps	Wagner Silveira	Microsoft
	Maximise your APIs with a Digital Integration Hub	Dan Toomey	Deloitte Consulting
9:30 AM – 10:20 AM	Help! My Azure bill just keeps getting bigger	Michael Stephenson	Turbo360
	Escape the Legacy Trap: Real-World BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Service migration Stories	Sandro Pereira	DevScope
10:20 AM – 10:45 AM	Break and Networking	–	–
10:45 AM – 11:45 AM	Event driven applications with Azure Messaging	Clemens Vasters Roberto Cervantes	Microsoft
	Lessons from the frontlines: Real-world success with Azure API Management across Security, Governance, and AI	Anish Tallapureddy Alex Vieira	Microsoft
11:45 AM – 12:40 PM	What’s new with Integration Environment and Business Process Tracking?	Kent Weare Divya Swarnkar	Microsoft
	Enhance API developer productivity and accelerate API adoption with Azure API platform	Sreekanth Thirthala Alex Vieira Kristof Van Tomme	Microsoft Microsoft Pronovix
12:40 PM – 01:30 PM	Running gen AI on your enterprise data at scale	Toon Vanhoutte	Noest
	Secure and scale your AI APIs with Azure API Management	Andrei Kamenev Julia Kasper	Microsoft
01:30 PM – 02:30 PM	Lunch	–	–
02:30 PM – 03:25 PM	Unleashing AI Potential in Integration: Innovation, Efficiency, and Security	Nino Crudele	X3M.AI
	Fraud detection with Azure API Management and Microsoft Fabric	Massimo Crippa	Codit
03:25 PM – 04:15 PM	Effective API governance in the era of AI with Azure API Management	Mark Weitzel Mike Budzynski	Microsoft
04:15 PM – 04:30 PM	Closing Note	Saravana Kumar	Kovai.co

_{[https://turbo360.com/events/integrate-2025/]}

Sponsors

These were the sponsors of the conference:

INTEGRATE 2025 Day 1 Highlights

Very conveniently, for every conference day, a recap is created by the Kovai.co Event Team. You can find the link for day 1 below:

https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-1-highlights

Table of Content:

• #1: Keynote
• #2: What’s new in Azure Logic Apps
• #3: How are we going to support all of this AI and Integration stuff?
• #4: Transforming BizTalk: A journey to modern integration
• #5: Real-time event streaming ingestion and processing with Fabric
• #6: Building agentic workflows using Azure Logic Apps
• #7: Messaging for the enterprise

INTEGRATE 2025 Day 2 Highlights

Very conveniently, for every conference day, a recap is created by the Kovai.co Event Team. You can find the link for day 2 below:

https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-2-highlights

Table of Content:
#1: Enhancing Developer Efficiency with Logic Apps
#2: Help! My Azure bill just keeps getting bigger
#3: Event driven applications with Azure Messaging
#4: Lessons from the frontlines: Real-world success with Azure API Management across Security, Governance, and AI
#5: What’s new with Integration Environment and Business Process Tracking?
#6: Enhance API developer productivity and accelerate API adoption with Azure API platform
#7: Secure and scale your AI APIs with Azure API Management
#8: Effective API governance in the era of AI with Azure API Management

After the conference you (with the right privileges) can look back at the recorded sessions for the 2 days, via:

https://events.hubilo.com/integrate-2025/sessions

Some of the conference news, information and key announcements

I leave it up to you to have a look at the sessions that were held and that may be interesting to you to have a look at.

In the following part in this article, I will mention some of the conference news, information and key announcements. Most what you read is a repetition of what is said by the speakers.

7 key announcements at INTEGRATE 2025

Keynote

Microsoft executives Balan Subramanian and Slava Koltovich delivered the keynote at Integrate 2025. They provided a comprehensive overview of the current state and future of integration services and generative AI at Microsoft. Their insights highlighted the importance of embracing AI and integration to drive efficiency, innovation, and competitive advantage in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.
_{[https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-1-highlights]}

The Importance of Integration:

• Integration is becoming the backbone of modern applications.
• Just as organizations once needed a website or a mobile app, they now require AI capabilities to remain competitive.
• The integration of AI into existing applications is essential for maximizing efficiency and effectiveness.

_{[https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-1-highlights]}

Generative AI is not a hype anymore, it’s happening and it’s happening now. You can now rely on your gen AI systems to do much of the work that you had to do manually before, Balan said.

What is coming next, is that a lot of organizations are looking at how agents can be introduced.

These datapoints stress out how important it is for integration developers, to start thinking about how are agents going to impact integrations and how are integrations going to support the creation of new agents.

What is an AI agent?

A key characteristic of an agent is that it uses LLM’s to plan and sequence actions to achieve specific goals.

Unlike standalone large language models (LLMs) or rule-based software/hardware systems, AI agents have these common features:

• Planning: AI agents can plan and sequence actions to achieve specific goals. The integration of LLMs has revolutionized their planning capabilities.
• Tool usage: Advanced AI agents can use various tools, such as code execution, search, and computation capabilities, to perform tasks effectively. AI agents often use tools through function calling.
• Perception: AI agents can perceive and process information from their environment, to make them more interactive and context aware. This information includes visual, auditory, and other sensory data.
• Memory: AI agents have the ability to remember past interactions (tool usage and perception) and behaviors (tool usage and planning). They store these experiences and even perform self-reflection to inform future actions. This memory component allows for continuity and improvement in agent performance over time.

Note:
The usage of the term memory in the context of AI agents is different from the concept of computer memory (like volatile, nonvolatile, and persistent memory).
_{[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/ai-agents]}

When you think about all the agents that you have to build and how you are going to build them, Azure offers different choices for this.

Azure AI Foundry – The agent factory

With Azure AI Foundry you can design, customize, manage, and support enterprise-grade AI apps and agents at scale, by using pre-built and customizable models, tools, and safeguards available in popular developer workspaces.
_{[https://azure.microsoft.com/nl-nl/products/ai-foundry#overview]}

Microsoft has done the work in the Foundry Agent Service to integrate with a whole bunch of knowledge sources and also for taking actions.

Single agents on their own are not enough, Enterprise automation is about automating multiple steps and systems to achieve a specific outcome. This is where agentic workflows come in and also where Logic Apps comes to play.

Agent loop

Agent loop is built into Logic Apps and it allows you to build autonomous or conversational agents. They act as any other Logic Apps action, but they are powered by LLM’s.

With Logic Apps’ extensive gallery of connectors, you can build fully autonomous agents that respond to real-time events — like new records in a database, files added to a share, or messages in a queue.
_{[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/integrationsonazureblog/%F0%9F%93%A2announcing-agent-loop-build-ai-agents-in-azure-logic-apps-%F0%9F%A4%96/4415052]}

A flexible concept of channels is introduced, that let you send messages to an agent and stream responses back while work flow is still running. This enables real time interactive conversations.

Agent Loop also supports conversational agents via Channels, allowing agents to interact with users through the Azure portal or custom chat clients.
_{[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/integrationsonazureblog/%F0%9F%93%A2announcing-agent-loop-build-ai-agents-in-azure-logic-apps-%F0%9F%A4%96/4415052]}

Of course, it doesn’t stop an a single agent. Logic Apps Agent loop supports multi-agent orchestration. It provides pretty much all multi-agent patterns.

Why Multi-Agents Matter
Building a single agent is often straightforward – it’s designed to perform a specific task, like answering common support queries or generating summaries from documents. However, real-world processes are rarely this simple. They often require multiple steps, context switching, and complex decision-making, which single agents struggle to handle alone. Multi-agent systems solve this by distributing specialized tasks across multiple agents, each optimized for a specific function, while maintaining coordination and context throughout the workflow.
_{[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azure-ai-services-blog/building-a-digital-workforce-with-multi-agents-in-azure-ai-foundry-agent-service/4414671]}

One of the most powerful aspects of Agent loop is the good integration with AI Foundry and Agent Service.

Microsoft projects that there will be over 1.3 Billion agents in the world within the next 3 years.

To meet this scale your integration platform must evolve.

So next, Slava talked about the Azure Integration Services (AIS) innovations, to help you with this.

Azure Integration Services innovations

One of our key priorities has been to deliver a more unified operational experience across AIS.

Not everything runs in the cloud and AIS reflects this reality. Over the past few years Microsoft build a solid hybrid story.

Logic Apps Hybrid is now also generally available. It allows you to run Logic Apps Standard in you on-premise environment, while managing them centrally from the Azure cloud control pane.

With this release also come two new connectors. A MQTT connector to integrate with on-premise message brokers like RabbitMQ, as well as the Kafka connector to support streaming in hybrid scenarios.

There are also a lot of updates coming to the messaging services.

Azure Event Hubs en Azure Service Bus are rolling out the General availability of the Geo Data Replication, enabling you to set up guaranteed message replication. You can now safely failover and failback across clouds without data loss.

Introducing Azure Logic Apps Codeful Workflows

Many love Logic Apps, but developers still want to write the actual code.
At the same time they do not want to lose the simplicity of using Logic Apps triggers and connectors or operational reliability and monitoring that the platform provides.

So now there is Codeful Workflows, a new Authoring Model in Logic Apps that brings the best of both worlds. Full control with real code, with all the power and productivity of the Logic Apps platform.

What Are Codeful Workflows?

Codeful Workflows expand the authoring and execution models of a Logic Apps Standard, offering developers the ability to implement, test and run workflows using an imperative programming model both locally and in the cloud. Built on frameworks like .NET and the Durable Tasks framework, Codeful Workflows allow you to structure workflows in code while seamlessly integrating with Logic Apps Standard rich connector ecosystem, and leverage its operational capabilities.

The core elements of a Logic App workflow—triggers, actions and connections —are translated into durable task concepts within this codeful model:

• Triggers are implemented as Client Functions that invoke durable orchestrations, which contain the body of the workflow, blending logic implemented by the language primitives, with connections actions for external connectivity.

• Connector actions are presented as Activity Functions. The Logic Apps Connector ecosystem is exposed to you via an SDK, bringing discoverability and rich support for intelisense when creating action inputs, invoking actions or reusing action outputs in later steps. The SDK vastly simplifies the execution of those connectors, by wrapping them internally on a Activity Function, so you don’t need to create new activities for each connector action you want to invoke.

• Connections, which manages the connectivitiy between actions and end systems, remains unchanged, allowing you to setup once and share connections between multiple orchestrations and logic apps declarative workflows. Connector actions uses a reference to a connection, providing flexibility between local and cloud configurations.

Using those building blocks, you can create workflows using familiar programming paradigms, while still benefiting from the easy configuration and operational feature of Logic Apps Standard.
_{[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/integrationsonazureblog/codeful-workflows-a-new-authoring-model-for-logic-apps-standard/4415702]}

According to Slava, this is where it gets really interesting. One of the most powerful use cases of Codeful Workflows is actually Agentic orchestration. You can use Codeful Workflows to build an run agents with Semantic Kernel natively.

If you want to register your interest in the “Azure Logic Apps Codeful Workflows” Private Preview, please see:

The text section below is from: “Codeful Workflows: A New Authoring Model for Logic Apps Standard”, Wagner Silveira (Senior Product Manager Azure Logic Apps at Microsoft), May 20, 2025.

Looking for feedback on Codeful Workflows
We are looking for early feedback on this feature. If you are interested in participating on a private preview, please use the form below to register your interest and we will contact you to share the instructions.

https://aka.ms/lacodeful/privatepreview/form

_{[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/integrationsonazureblog/codeful-workflows-a-new-authoring-model-for-logic-apps-standard/4415702]}

Event driven applications with Azure Messaging

Clemens Vasters, Principal Architect at Microsoft, spoke in his part of the session “Event driven applications with Azure Messaging” about “Metadata in Eventing – An emerging story”.

Here’s a summary of his session:
_{[https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-2-highlights]}

• Unified Namespace (revisited): Formalizing the unified namespace concept using xRegistry to capture machine status messages with assigned paths.

• Metadata Importance: Emphasizing the need for schemas to improve data quality and clarify intent, especially for AI applications.

In the JSON world, schemas are very optional as opposed to schemas in the XML world. That is coming into question as to whether that is good, because it is not good for data quality. We need to have a better idea of what a data structure means, Clemens pointed out.

Metadata for AI is going to be a huge topic.

There were 3 things Clements further talked about:

• CNCF Cloud Events
• CNCF xRegistry
• JSON Structure

CNCF Cloud Events

A standard for defining events and their protocol bindings (cloudevents.io).
_{[https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-2-highlights]}

CloudEvents you should be familiar with, if you’re not you can read up on it: https://cloudevents.io.

CloudEvents is a specification for describing event data in a common way.
_{[https://cloudevents.io]}

In JSON encoding this is an example of a CloudEvent:

CNCF xRegistry

An extensible registry for metadata, endpoints, schemas, and message metadata, providing a formal way to format streams and define schemas for data in pipelines (xregistry.soaphub.org?ui).
_{[https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-2-highlights]}

The xRegistry project defines an model-driven approach to managing metadata like schemas or event definitions and provides a REST-based interface and a document format that are structurally symmetric. You can use the standard registries for event-driven applications that are included, or you can define your own registries for other types of metadata. Multiple registries can be used together to form a single registry for all of your metadata, forming a metadata graph that can be used to discover and validate metadata across systems.
_{[https://xregistry.io/]}

Clemens showed an example of a formal way to describe an event and how that links to a data schema URI that points to the schema’s for the event payload.

The nice thing about xRegistry is that it allows you to describe these things in a file or in an API server (https://xregistry.soaphub.org/?ui).

He navigated to the events belonging to the example mentioned earlier.

MCP XReg: 
A temporary site (mcpxreg.com) with X Registry plugins and models for agent card providers, API providers, and container registries, aiming to build a uniform message metadata graph.
_{[https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-2-highlights]}

With regard to metadata in “agent land”, Clemens showed the temporary site (mcpxreg.com), that is in current development, for the benefit of LLM’s.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, open-source framework introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize the way artificial intelligence (AI) models like large language models (LLMs) integrate and share data with external tools, systems, and data sources.
_{[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Context_Protocol]}

JSON Structure

A proposed IETF Internet draft (json-structure.org) to fix the problems of JSON Schema by simplifying it, providing a better type system, and offering annotations for scientific units and currencies.
_{[https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-2-highlights]}

In short, as Clemens said: JSON Structure is the parts of JSON Schema that you like, without any of the terrible parts that you all hate.

Clemens invites you to take a look at it and make noise about it:

https://json-structure.org/

Key Takeaways of Clemens’s talk:

• Azure Messaging is evolving to support diverse event-driven scenarios, including IoT and real-time data processing.
• MQTT and AMQP are becoming increasingly important protocols.
• Metadata and schemas are crucial for data quality and AI applications.
• X Registry and JSON Structure are initiatives to improve metadata management and data definition.

_{[https://turbo360.com/blog/integrate-2025-day-2-highlights]}

Concluding

Attending INTEGRATE 2025, again was great for me in gaining new insights and knowledge on a variety of subjects, in particular the new features in the Azure integration stack, with regard to Artificial Intelligence (AI).