Business agility is the Holy Grail that all enterprises pursue. As a result, technologies that make the integration process smoother and faster are foremost in the minds of all IT executives. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is one such integration technology that is increasingly gaining more attention from buyers. This note provides information on:
- The technological makeup of an ESB, and the five basic components that must be present in an ESB solution.
- How the ESB has risen to become the business integration solution of choice.
- The benefits that ESB provides to the enterprise as an integration solution.
- Which types of enterprises should use an ESB.
- The potential pitfalls associated with the ESB.
ESB holds significant promise for solving business integration problems, and potential buyers must have an unbiased picture of this technology before forming a strategy or making a selection.
Technology Point
Finding a technological solution for implementing business agility invariably highlights the problems that poor data, information, and process integration causes. Over the last 15 years, enterprises addressed these business integration problems by using architectures and paradigms like:
- The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). An architecture that describes an object model for enabling objects to share their characteristics across multiple enterprise applications to create an integrated application.
- (Distributed) Component Object Model (DCOM/COM). A model based on the object-oriented paradigm. The object model was designed and promoted by Microsoft Corporation and defined interfaces so that objects could request services from any server in the network.
- Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). This is a component architecture that a number of large software vendors promoted — the foremost were Sun Microsystems and IBM. This architecture allowed developers to build object-oriented, distributed applications that maintained transactional integrity. Enterprises frequently built their own integration solutions using EJBs.
- Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). The goal of implementing the EAI paradigm was to enable data sharing and coordinating process execution amongst all the applications in the enterprise.
Implementations of these architectures and paradigms had some success although they suffered from a number of shortcomings:
- They used proprietary protocols and did not employ widely accepted standards.
- They were monolithic and difficult to scale.
- They were hard to configure and learn and required very specialized skills to develop and manage solutions.
- They suffered performance problems and the promise of scalability was difficult to realize.