To be able to adapt to market changes, organizations tend to focus on flexibility and responsiveness. The IT challenge has usually been to support this business vision with the appropriate architectures and technologies.
Early initiatives were to break monolithic applications into callable sub-routines but the advance of remote object invocation and messaging processing changed that.
More recently, it has become crucial to increase the reuse of existing assets in the organization (which increased return on investment) and to assemble heterogeneous applications to form a coherent business solution. This has helped to drive the adoption of SOA and EDA. These two different design paradigms are aimed at maximizing the reuse of application-neutral services that increase IT adaptability and efficiency. But building and deploying large-scale integration solutions has never been easy to achieve. That's where the ESB comes into play, because it simplifies the realization of flexible and reliable architectures (SOA and EDA) for mission critical applications.
