When ESBs become products
I went along to the recent IBM SOA event in London to get an update on the WebSphere platform and to see what all the fuss was about their SOA Launch ... all was looking as expected; this was predominantly a re-branding of the platform (with some updates) that was to herald their 'arrival' in the SOA space (hello - I thought they were already there) - ok so this was to announce that their marketing had finally caught up. Fine - no problem I guess until they went and mentioned that damned ESB acronym! Argh!!!
Ok so what were they going to say ... the keynote speaker waited to slide 10 or so (a good sign according to Ovum) and skirted around the subject a little ...referring to ‘a great philosophical debate that has raged internally as to whether ESB is a product or a pattern’ ... few … until he concluded 'But if my customers are asking "where is your ESB product?" then I damned well don't care about whether it is a pattern or not – I want a product!'. People laughed and he moved on quickly …
A guy from Ovum followed on with a particularily good rant on the subject of ESBs and so I thought – we’re ok …. but then it happened … the next guy went through the list of what we can expect to see in WebSphere … and there it was ‘WebSphere ESB’ – a product!! Argh!
So what is it? Well this was where it got really interesting … ESB was not alone … there was also WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere Process Server to cloud the issue. Fundamentally WebSphere ESB just turns out to be the base product with limited support for message transformations, routing is provided by their J2EE support for JMS which is standard. I believe their might be some extended UI but that is about it. For anything useful you need to pick up Process Server. Message Broker seemed to be another red herring and turned out to be their C-based platform based on MQSeries.
Later, I asked one of the representatives about WebSphere ESB and he replied with a rather embarrassed look, ‘I wouldn’t get too hung up on ESB Server’ and was very vague as to how much it might cost.
So there you go … when ESBs become products you better be really sure of what you get over an above what you’ve already bought. I wonder whether Microsoft or BEA will end up bringing out an ESB too … oh – I forgot … they already have – all the ingredients for ESB are in their suite of products already and like WebSphere have been for quite sometime – funny that:)!
