Oh what a tangled Web we weave when first we practice to integrate....
My colleague Gian Trotta just conducted an interview with Leif Davidsen, worldwide product marketing manager for WebSphere Application Integration for IBM. (Podcast and transcript posted here.)
Davidsen sees entreprise service buses (ESBs) as the most logical starting point for SOA-based build-outs. But one size of ESB does not fit all. Many organizations are tangled spaghetti-oriented architectures of point-to-point interfaces, adapters, connectors, middleware, and other motley assortments of integration attempts. All through the 1990s and most of the 2000s, companies spent megadollars on various integration approaches, and the expensive consulting fees that went with it.
“What many businesses today tend to have is a real rat’s nest of connectivity links between their existing applications," Davidsen told Gian. He cited the challenges organizations face as a result of all these point-to-point hard-coupled links that they've built over the years. For example, these integration points tend to swamp "the actual business logic that the application is actually there to perform and increasing the cost of changing or maintaining that application." Plus, these spaghetti-oriented architectures introduce "the potential for errors or fragility."
IBM introduces three levels of ESBs that fit the budgets and sophistication of various types of end users. Interestingly, he considers Datapower appliances (IBM acquired Datapower last year) to be a form of ESB, though not in the traditional sense. Datapower devices are designed to manage XML traffic, helping to accelerate its movement while providing additional security. That way, such processing loads can be offloaded from corporate servers. "The DataPower application device is a very different sort of ESB; it’s sort of unique within IBM," Davidsen said.
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