The New Seven Wonders of ESB

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Dain Hansen's Blog | October 3, 2007   4:37 PM | Comments (0)

I am here in beautiful Barcelona, for BEA World’s annual worldwide conference. Take a look at some of the cool blogs about the buzz at the BEA World show day 1 (Quinton Wall). One of the buzz items: ESBs have come quite a bit since their inception. Solutions based on ESB technology is emerging as a de-facto standard fabric for Service Oriented Architecture. They have become one of the most universally accepted solutions. Because of this I think we updated definitions about what ESBs are and where they are heading.

3 years ago when ESBs first started taking off we saw something like this which helps give a picture of how far we’ve come [this is from an actual email I saved, minus the annotations in red]

• Step 1: Connect .NET client with Java Web Services to AXIS. (Hey weren’t those supposed to inter operate?)
• Step 2: Validate, Transform, Route, Operate (I vetoed the VTRO because it was too inflexible)
• Step 3: Repeat steps above with JMS (Because without WS-RM there was no reliability!)
• Step 4: Add both Transport and Message Security with Identity propagation (no comment. This actually was a good idea and still is)
• Step 5: Just Add Monitoring (without interfering with the message or adding latency!)

Complete these five steps in under about 15 minutes (without writing a line of code) and you’ve entered into the ESB playing field.

Well now it is near the end of 2007 and we’re starting to see a new level of sophistication in what’s expected out of ESBs. I have compiled a list of the “New Seven Wonders of ESB” as an homage to the new 7 wonders which was dreadfully needed since no one could find, visit, or remember the original 7 wonders.

ESB Wonder #1: “Smart Connectivity”– ESB technology has been universally accepted, now the pressure is on to broaden their purpose to deliver on the original promises of SOA. For instance, ESBs have the flexibility to extend their reach into services, WS-*, JMS, File, FTP/S, MQ, but is that broad enough? What about legacy connectivity? What about out-of-the-box packaged app connectivity for SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, Oracle? What about custom/proprietary connectivity. Aren’t adapters dead already?

ESB Wonder #2: “Unified Integration” – And since ESBs are becoming the fabric for SOA, shouldn’t that fabric be woven seamlessly through all business integration technologies: ESBs + BPM, Data Services, EAI, AI, Semantic Platforms, and other emerging forms of integration? Without ESBs, these integration technologies rely on point-to-point integration which creates issues with future process changes & business agility.  

ESB Wonder #3: “SOA Governance Ready” – ESBs also need to monitor traffic “on the bus”. Is this SOA management? No. There is additional down-stream services managed holistically apart from the bus. AquaLogic Service Bus today works closely with AquaLogic SOA Management (for those of you that heard my round-table today!); I call this “managed-readiness”. But even more wondrous, ESB is a participant in the Governance lifecycle; policies, service metadata, prescribed assets can be centrally managed by a Repository/Registry. In summary, ESBs can become SOA Governance-ready when they are managed-ready and participate in SOA Governance.

ESB Wonder #4: “Industry focus” – Take a look at my blog post on AquaLogic Service Bus, Financial Services Edition, which addresses how the financial industry is adopting ESB to support financial payments & settlements standards. We’ll start to see more ESBs like this one that embrace the industry “flair” to build greater value than generic ESBs.

ESB Wonder #5: “No Boundaries” – ESBs are emerging beyond simple small project silos, they are traversing boundaries, bridging communities of interest, and connecting customers to partners, building increasing value along the way. We’re starting to hear companies both adopt big busses & little busses working together to provide a a Service Network (See Bill's blognote on Paul Patrick's Keynote)

ESB Wonder #6: “A new kind of ESB Virtualization” – Related closely with Wonder #6, we are starting to see companies adopt ‘virtualization’ strategies (not to be confused with service virtualization. The reason: save on operation costs as well as boost performance and lower latency. Undoubtedly, new ESBs will be on the forefront to run on virtualization engines. 

ESB Wonder #7: “Step beyond SOA” Which I would vote as the most significant wonder. ESBs are beginning to move beyond WS-* and into newer as well as even more traditional technologies. Ironically ESBs need to take a few steps back to take giant leaps forward. For instance Web 1.0 and basic events need to be supported before Web 2.0 or complex event processing. The increasing trend towards increased business visibility, near real-time response opportunities & threats and situational awareness will drive the need for CEP enabled ESBs to address the handling of low-latency, high volume events. The increased evolution of Web2.0 and enterprise mash ups (and even event aware mash ups) will drive the need for light weight (for REST based web services) ESBs 
 
As ESBs mature, ESBs will take on new forms to enable greater customer benefits. BEA is using AquaLogic Service Bus as its foundation core for SOA and quickly becoming a key to unlock what we see beyond SOA: Dynamic Business Applications - take a look at Jon's blognote on Alfred's keynote. Over the coming months, we’ll be announcing new editions to the AquaLogic Service Bus family to address many of these new wonders!

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