In August 2004, I wrote that the "bus does not stop here." I explained
that enterprise
service buses, the 21st century form of message oriented middleware (MOM),
were becoming popular underlying middle-of-the-stack software. But they were not
being used very often free standing, that is, just to replace enterprise application
integration (EAI) software for example. More interesting, many users were starting
to build a service-oriented architecture (SOA) without an enterprise service bus
(ESB). It wasn't logical but the marketplace rarely is.
The next time I looked, about 18 months ago, that pattern still held. I did
find that the number of "bus routes" had grown however. By that I
meant that suppliers that had originally offered ESBs only underlying their
other midstack software had begun to offer ESBs a la carte as well. IBM and
BEA were leading examples of that trend. Still the suppliers' preference was
to sell you their 'higher order' software, enabled by the ESB, rather than just
sell you the ESB. "The bus still did not stop" with just the bus,
and therefore the ESB market as a separate entity was not booming. IBM and BEA
telegraphed their new ESB plans for a year before they announced, which probably
held ESB adoption back. (Fear, uncertainly and doubt works throughout the information
technology [IT] market and is not just an anti-open-source-software (OSS) phenomenon.)
But something else was happening in the user community that I couldn't pin
down back when I last took a look. So I looked again last month. The trends
I saw 18 and 36 months ago seem to be continuing but I think I now see the reason
for user hesitation when it comes to freestanding ESBs. I think the OSS community
is the culprit.
User Waited To Avoid Lock-in, Lower Costs
Quietly, multiple OSS ESB projects started up in the 2003-2004 timeframe. They
were incubating while Progress, TIBCO and others traded PR releases about which
supplier built the first ESB. OSS communities and sponsoring suppliers jumped
in with OSS ESBs, almost as soon as the concept took form. In my 2007 MOM/ESB
research, I found almost a dozen ESB/MOM OSS projects that began in 2003 or
since and that have even matured from the community stage to productization.
The newcomers include
Bostech ChainBuilder (based on Open ESB community efforts)
Covalent (providing support for Apache ActiveMQ)
Iona Fuse project (based on code acquired with LogicBlaze and Iona's own
previous OSS ESB effort, Celtix)
Mule project and Mulesource
Optaros (providing support for multiple OSS products)
OW2's pending project
Red Hat (via its 2006 JBoss acquisition)
Sun (via its new OSS policy and indirectly via the 2005 SeeBeyond acquisition
and Project Open ESB effort within the Java Community Process)
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