Email	Print Reprint
	add to:
	Del.icio.us Digg Google Furl	Slashdot Y! MyWeb Blink
	TABLE OF CONTENTS Home But Wait One Second Catch The Enterprise Service Bus Dial XML For Security Monday Morning Quarterback

Catch The Enterprise Service Bus

The buzzword of 2007 in the ESB space will be fabric. You're not just deploying an enterprise service bus, you're building the foundation for an enterprise information fabric through which data is pulled from multiple sources and comes out the other end as information that's ready to be consumed by business analysts--as long as we don't all unravel first.

BEA and webMethods are both pushing the fabric concept, though in BEA's case, this approach appears to be little more than a justification for separating BEA's service-enablement layer from its ESB. In contrast, competing products from CapeClear Software, Fiorona Software, IONA Technologies, Oracle, Software AG and TIBCO all include service enablement in their ESB offerings. Although most of those adapters aren't free, they are at least available on a single platform and don't require a second product to manage access to enterprise application and data sources. But BEA's AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) does bring to the table the notion of virtualization of data sources, and it offers EII-like functionality--something BEA's ESB competitors can't match.

Upshot Click to enlarge in another window

The ESB market is still young and evolving, so 2007 is likely to bring a push toward the inclusion of this EII-like functionality in other ESB products. The impetus will primarily be driven by platform vendors, such as IBM and Sybase, that have previously made acquisitions in this space.

In the meantime, the question of scalability remains No. 1 in the minds of IT groups deploying ESBs. As the number of messages and transactions flowing through an ESB continues to grow, and enterprises move from a departmental strategy to an enterprise-wide strategy for their ESB and SOA initiatives, scalability will continue to be a huge question mark. IBM has already begun to quietly address these questions by introducing a number of best-practice deployment architectures that include the notion of ESB federation and gateway strategies--distributing the load among multiple ESB instances in order to address the relatively low performance capabilities of ESB products today.

Previous Page | 1 | 2 But Wait One Second | 3 Catch The Enterprise Service Bus | 4 Dial XML For Security | 5 Monday Morning Quarterback Next Page

RELATED ARTICLES No Related Articles		TOP 5 ARTICLES No Top Articles.