Gartner Inc. recently predicted that more than half of all large enterprises will have at least the core of an enterprise service bus (ESB) running by the end of 2006. There are, however, several factors to consider before investing in this technology. First, let's understand that an ESB is a core component of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA provides the ability to decouple the links between business functions and specific applications by isolating service definition and usage from the underlying service implementation.
An ESB implements an SOA through middleware that offers virtualization and management of service interactions between communication participants. Thus, this flexible connectivity layer could help connect and integrate an organization's IT infrastructure across many differing systems and locations reliably and securely while reducing the number, size and complexity of application interfaces.
