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Forrester’s latest ESB study is already drawing the predictable press releases as each featured vendor promotes their own highlights. However, a more detailed reading reinforces a significant maturing of the products towards what I see as the eventual destination of ESB suites: matching the functionality of the BPM slanted integration suites from vendors such as Tibco and IBM (who of course are also repositioning these products as ESBs).

Before getting into the detail, Mike Gilpin and Ken Vollmer, the analysts who created this report, should be congratulated for creating what I would regard as the most detailed and coherent study from any analyst I am aware of. This is an update on their first report published back in December 2005, the creation of which I saw close up while I was still with PolarLake (one of the featured ESB vendors who I am delighted to see score highest in terms of current offering in this report).

Setting aside the actual detail of the report which can be read at the Cape Clear website, Forrester recognizes that most of the features previously identified with what Forrester calls integration-centric business process management suites or IC-BPMS (what others might simply call EAI suites) are now part of a fully featured ESB. And the newer features added to the IC-BPMS products (listed by Forrester to be Human Workflow, Simulation, Event Management and Complex Event Processing) will become available as part of an ESB by 2008.

To me at least this is not surprising: at the end of the day the capabilities required to solve complex integration challenges do not simply disappear with the move to SOA: We still need orchestration, data transformation and human workflow in the SOA world – not in necessarily precisely the same way as before, but we still need them.

So is an ESB just an updated IC-BPMS product (I really can’t see that acronym being widely used but I will stick to it as Forrester use it in the report)?

Absolutely not, the obvious benefits of being standards based – and hence reducing the cost of skilling-up and reducing the lock-in, and the lower license costs are fairly well known. And of course ESBs are typically built specifically to support Service Oriented Architectures.

However, given the need to justify any software purchase through Return on Investment, the most compelling difference that the report highlights is one that I have always felt is at the real heart of any ESB:

Customers use metadata to configure ESBs, which makes them easier to implement than IC-BPMS products.

Forrester’s research findings are clear on the benefits of configuration driven implementation: it halved the implementation time associated with ESBs over IC-BPM products. Knowing the methodology behind this report, this finding will be based on extensive customer interviews and not simply vendor marketing.

Posted by rbradley in Enterprise Service Bus |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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