The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Buses, Q1 2009

In Forrester's 171-criteria evaluation of enterprise service bus (ESB) vendors, we found that Progress Software, Oracle, Software AG, IBM, and TIBCO Software support the broadest range of protocols and other features, have the most-focused ESB and service-oriented-architecture- (SOA-) related strategies, the most-mature tooling, and the greatest flexibility in deployment and configuration. IONA Technologies (recently acquired by Progress Software) and Sun Microsystems are Strong Performers: They have very solid products that lack only some of the breadth of the Leaders', each in different areas. Another Strong Performer, JBoss, a Division of Red Hat, and Contender MuleSource both provide solutions with strong core functionality; these vendors' scores suffer primarily because their solutions have fewer features than those of their older competitors. Microsoft, also a Contender, offers a solution that will appeal strongly to BizTalk users looking for ESB-like mediation but suffered in the evaluation because of its Windows centricity and the assemble-it-from-a-kit nature of its ESB solution.