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ESB: The lighter alternative for integration

Gary Flood ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 29 Jan 2004 17:25 GMT

Independent Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) vendors include Sonic Software, Spiritsoft, Blue Titan and Cape Clear. But they're not going to be the only games in town for much longer. IBM is expected to launch some kind of an ESB product under the Websphere brand later this year, while established EAI players like SeeBeyond have started to extend their offerings in this direction too.

Spiritsoft, a UK-US ESB start-up, numbers Etrade, Barclaycard and Dutch financial institution Rabbo Bank among its customers. Its UK-based chief technology officer Rob Davies explains more. "There's growing interest in the integration stack coming out of J2EE, but in many ways ESB is a true successor to EAI, but this time we're putting much more of an open standards-based face on integration."

Spiritsoft, which grew out of a big middleware project at the City offices of Japanese investment bank Nomura, is set to launch a new product in April tied to the new Apache Geronimo J2EE-based Web server and connector system. Meanwhile its main rival, Sonic Software, a subsidiary of Progress Software, claims to be doing around $15m worth of straight ESB business already per year, up from $2.5m in its first year of 2001, according to its VP and chief technology evangelist Dave Chappell.

"We spotted back at the time that JMS was first launched that the best way to do the kind of highly distributed integration customers wanted to do was through this new form of message-oriented middleware," he says. "What's great about ESB as compared to the old hub and spoke is it's less monolithic and easier to span boundaries in both companies and beyond, potentially. The ESB combination of Web Services, enterprise standard messaging and intelligent routing means this is something all new projects that involve linking together applications should look at. ESB in essence is changing the economies of scale of integration itself. ESB really provides the architecture Web services can live in."

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