Sidebar: Players & Approaches

Computerworld - Vendors offering ESB technology can be broadly separated into three camps: pure-play ESB companies, application server vendors whose products can be customized to meet ESB requirements, and traditional EAI players that are building support for Web services standards on top of their integration platforms.
Forrester Research analyst Mike Gilpin describes pure-play ESB products from companies such as Sonic Software, Fiorano Software Inc. and Cape Clear Software Inc. as "lightweight ESBs" that generally can be used off the shelf at a fraction of the price of EAI offerings.
Lightweight is not a pejorative term, says Gilpin. "What we really mean is that it is easy to implement and maintain, as opposed to light in not having good capabilities," he says.
Sonic, which has been shipping an ESB product since 2002, has a Java messaging infrastructure embedded in its ESB, which it markets as an extension to message-oriented middleware to provide services with added business process management.
Gordon Van Huizen, chief technology officer at Bedford, Mass.-based Sonic, says an ESB must provide support for transforming the format of applications so they can be used by other services.
"That configuration should be handled through metadata so you create better control over what is happening between the services," he says. "You can make some very dramatic changes in how systems interact just by changing the configuration metadata."
Although Waltham, Mass.-based Cape Clear doesn't have messaging technology in its ESB, it aims to provide ways to coordinate Web services and SOA interactions on top of existing enterprise messaging infrastructure.
IBM and BEA Systems Inc. don't offer ESB products today, but both are beefing up their application server product lines to meet the growing enterprise demand for ESB-like functionality.
Last month, IBM announced the availability of WebSphere MQ Version 6, which for the first time merges the MQ messaging stack with the WebSphere stack, the primary plumbing that IBM offers for an ESB.
Gilpin notes that most IBM customers today need a highly customized ESB because they have very high-end and unique requirements.
"IBM can implement an ESB using their technology and services, but it ends up being a specific ESB to the particular customer," he adds.
BEA is set to ship an ESB code-named QuickSilver in the summer. While its WebLogic application server software is well suited for creating and composing Web services, the ESB will provide dynamic service integration, says Kelly Emo, San Jose-based BEA's director of product marketing.
"The new part of it is the SOA and this idea that you're treating theendpoints as shared services and using Web service standards and metadata ... to create an easy, simple way to connect and manage your services," she says. "With QuickSilver using the configuration model, you can add new services ... while the other services are connecting and interacting."
Finally, the third camp of vendors marketing products under the ESB umbrella includes traditional EAI vendors like Iona Technologies and Tibco Software Inc., which have built support for Web services standards for specifying integration in XML on top of their existing platforms.
These ESB offerings are best suited for EAI users that want to incrementally add integration using services on top of what they already have, according to Gilpin.