ESB: The lighter alternative for integration
Published: 29 Jan 2004 17:25 GMT
Traditionally, organisations looking to integrate applications and software have tended to look to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platforms from players like Tibco or Vitria.
But while still the gold standard for heavy-duty integration, the platform approach -- often also called 'hub and spoke' -- is a non-trivial task in terms of both initial cost and consultancy. A new alternative gaining traction among analysts is a Java-based alternative, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
"ESB is good because the system is inherently networked and distributed," notes IDC's director of European software research, Rob Hailstone. He likes ESB because of it being standards-based, but also because it's extensible.
ESB has come out of two sources: messaging and Java. The idea is that applications are connected to a more lightweight backbone than the traditional EAI platform, which then takes care of functions such as intelligent routing and transformation, connecting and coordinating the interaction of services across highly distributed contexts.
Messaging may be an incomplete way of appreciating what ESB is all about, however. "ESB is a really new sort of message-broker based architecture, taking on a further stage architectures like the Common Object Request Broker Architecture of the 1990s," thinks Christophe Toulemonde, integration programme director for Meta Group in Paris.
No matter what their intellectual provenance, there's no denying ESB is a hot topic for the integration market. In a recent research note (December 2003) Gartner went so far as to predict that ESBs will replace traditional communication middleware in new applications by 2007.
Integration observers think this will be because people can't really afford to wait around to do everything EAI-fashion, and also can use this as an entry point into the coming SOA (service-oriented architecture) future. "Traditional EAI hubs make sense if you're taking on a big project which can cost justify linking a large number of systems," says IDC's Hailstone. "But in reality most integration is about linking more like two. ESB can help in making that move more cost effective. And in terms of product maturity we're up to round two now, with some reasonably mature products. So the good news is that in the end, service-oriented architecture will make it much more possible to do 'mix and match' integration projects."
ESB fans claim this is a both a lower-cost and less complex alternative, which though at the moment probably best suited for tactical integration, usually around linking existing systems with the Web, is set for explosive growth on the back of rising deployment of Web services.
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