Shaping Your Middleware Strategy To Benefit From ESBs

Many enterprise message-oriented middleware (MOM) infrastructures have evolved into complex assemblies of multiple proprietary products. Despite innovations like enterprise application integration (EAI) and Java Message Service (JMS), business software remains closely tied to specific technologies. The rise of SOA and Web services standards, along with infrastructure lessons from the past, is driving the ongoing evolution of the enterprise service bus (ESB). Easier to work with, less expensive, and less proprietary than earlier approaches, ESBs provide a broad range of capabilities that support the more flexible abstractions of SOA and can be readily applied to a variety of roles within your enterprise infrastructure. The challenge for enterprise architects is to develop an incremental strategy for infrastructure evolution that replaces existing components with superior ESB-based solutions over time, balancing short-term needs with the opportunity to dramatically simplify enterprise messaging infrastructure.