In the last few years we have been hearing a lot about the The Cloud. Software, Platforms and Servers all delivered nice and easy without having to bother about setting up hardware or perform complex configurations. The difference from a few years ago is that The Cloud is no longer something of the future, it is here and it is growing fast. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Red Hat and Oracle are ramping up their Cloud offerings. Wait a minute, wasn't this supposed to be about integration, so why is The Cloud important?
For many years integration platforms have been aimed mainly at big businesses but in the last few years we can see medium size companies joining the movement. Since the arrival of SOA, integration with services has been much easier and less expensive than in the past. This has been a real enabler for integrations platforms because there in now a cost benefit in "integration" as opposed to a "build your own" solution.
Today smaller organisations and even single developers can build services and make them available on the Internet but for small actors there is perhaps the difficulty of purchasing platforms, maintaining and hosting these services. This is where The Cloud comes in. With The Cloud growing in maturity and many of the big stakeholders offering very inexpensive hosting (in some cases free) this allows small and medium actors to publish services which with a guaranteed accessibility. In addition to this we are seeing the appearance of the "Internet of Things" (IoT). This means we can expect a huge amount of devices all connected to The Cloud and all communicating with each other (see Internet of Things).
All of this means that integration is going to be of huge importance in the coming years.
The Rise of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Integration Platforms have been around for many years running batch integrations (ETL) and real time integrations (EAI). The difference is that in the past these platforms were pretty heavy stuff, sometimes tough to configure, difficult to deploy and manage, and time consuming to develop. With the projected volume of integration and more focus on EAI we need something which is lightweight, flexible and can deliver a high performance. Some years ago with the popularity of SOA the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) arrived on this scene as a core component in a SOA architecture. The ESB is the component in our architecture which facilitates Integration by providing routing, mediation, transformation and protocol transparency among other things.
It has taken sometime for acceptance of the ESB but the market for ESBs is now in full swing. The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2 2011 report details that in a survey that 32% of the Enterprises surveyed were considering an ESB and 32% were already expanding or upgrading.
While ESBs have been traditionally focused on EAI some of the vendors are even packaging ETL tools with their offerings as a complete Integration package.
Choose your Weapon
The ESB market is hotting up and there is a healthy competition. Which ESB you choose will depend on your specific environment. But here are some of the contenders:
- MuleESB (MuleSoft)
- Oracle Service Bus (Oracle)
- Azure Service Bus (Microsoft)
- FuseSouce (RedHat)
- WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB)
- Sonic ESB (Progress Software)
- webMethods ESB Platform (Software AG)
- ActiveMatrix Service Bus (Tibco)
- WSO2 ESB (WSO2)
From these products we can see some of the old familiar faces. An interesting development is the arrival of the Azure Service Bus which puts Microsoft firmly in the ESB market but raises questions about the future of BizTalk. Mule ESB is gathering a lot of momentum with a growing collection of connectors and a growing collection of customer cases too. Another interesting move is the purchase of FuseSource by Red Hat. Red Hat have had difficulties in establishing their ESB offering and the recent purchase of FuseSource should certainly strengthen their position.
Conclusion
With new technologies and maturity of The Cloud integration is an important issue on the agenda and the ability to integrate with devices, services and applications will be a critical business factor. We can expect a more competitive ESB market with affordable products for small actors all the way up to big enterprises. It certainly feels like we are entering a new age for integration.
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