Whitepapers - Business Integration

Enterprise Service Bus Evolves to meet Stringent Market Realities

Introducing new levels of scalability, ease-to-use, reliability and affordability

Applications and Data play a vital role in corporate survival today. Businesses have invested significantly in upgrading their IT hardware into massively scalable infrastructures. Application Integration Platforms (AIPs) leverage the underlying IT infrastructure, and support enterprise-wide deployments of integrated applications.

While the underlying hardware IT infrastructure has progressed to a true peer-to-peer resource network, AIPs have lagged with earlier generations of centralized hub-and-spoke or Integration bus oriented architectures that do not leverage all the compute and storage power available at the end-points of modern IT networks. Resulting operational inefficiencies between the AIP and IT infrastructures lead to greater deployment complexities and costs. Forrester has estimated that the G3500 companies will spend an average of US$ 6.4-Million each in 2003 on integration projects, and further, that only 35% of the integration projects will be delivered on projected budgets and schedules.

Given the enormous opportunity, AIP vendors need to address customer requirements such as:

  • Simplicity “Can the majority of non-technical corporate users create, manage and easily modify an integrated application under secure and controlled access mechanisms?”
  • Risk mitigation “I need to leverage my multi-million dollar investments in current proprietary solutions. However, my competitors are deploying the next-generation alternatives. How do I migrate into an affordable, proven standards driven solution?”
  • Predictability “Code customization and unwieldy complexities are a recurring nightmare. Can the new AIP solutions help me manage my projects on time, at cost? Will they help me reuse all the work going into creating the new solutions?”

This paper provides a perspective on the evolution of AIPs from point products to second-generation solutions such as the Enterprise Service Bus - ESB.

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