Sunday, April 22, 2007

Sidewalk: IBM's Enterprise Service Bus - a misnomer?

Recently I heard the podcast of interview of Leif Davidsen, Product Manager, WebSphere Application Integration, IBM. Interestingly, Mr Davidsen talked about multiple types of ESBs offered by IBM - 2 of which are ESBs that supported:
- Services driven integration (WebSphere ESB), and
- Application to application integration (Advanced ESB - WebSphere Message Broker)

He also mentioned that IBM's approach towards SOA centered around 5 different entry points: People, Process, Information, Reuse & Connectivity and that ESB was very much at the heart of SOA.

There is indeed no doubt that ESB is an essential vehicle in the journey towards SOA. However, I am confused about IBM's implementation of ESB. Does message broker really fit the defintion of ESB? Or is IBM trying to push their entire suite of integration offerings under the umbrella of ESB just to leverage the hype surrounding acronyms such as ESBs and SOA?

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