Over the past four years we have seen a great deal of favorable adoption of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as a product category in the IT industry. The ESB has taken off and evolved in the ways it is implemented and deployed since the term was first coined in 2002. Numerous Application Platform Suite (APS) vendors such as IBM and BEA, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) vendors such as TIBCO and webMethods and even Web Services toolkit vendors have all adopted the ESB moniker. Even British Telecom has embedded an ESB in a hardware box with their “BT Integrate” offering. We have also seen some significant changes in the way technologists in IT departments view the role of an ESB as an important part of their IT landscape. As is the case with most new technology categories, it has taken some time for the hype to subside. Now that the dust has settled, we can see the practical uses of ESBs as they get deployed in the real world.
Analyst views from firms such as Gartner and Forrester have also shifted from hailing ESB as the all-you’ll-ever-need for SOA to more of an implied part of the infrastructure in support of a SOA. Reports from these analysts and from thought-leading vendors have provided greater clarity on what makes up the definition of an ESB. The constant that remains is that an ESB is used to connect, mediate and control the interactions between a diverse set of applications that are exposed through the bus using service-level interfaces.
