*Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt prepared for ebizQ from a report originally issued by the Patricia Seybold Group on December 15, 2005. The full report details are available at http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=668

Research Recap: Enterprise Service Bus for Integration and Event-Driven/Process-Driven SOA

Over the course of a year, we have been actively researching two interconnected IT architecture areas—integration and service-oriented architecture (SOA)—that are foundational to building a customer-adaptive architecture.

Not only are integration and SOA connected in the end game—delivering customer-adaptive IT solutions—but also in their IT instantiations. These connections are (minimally) three fold. First, SOA is commonly used to achieve business, application, and/or information integration. Business-oriented services are often employed to provide access to disparate resources, execute a business process, and/or disseminate information. Second, service orientation is starting to be applied to integration infrastructure, in the form of networked integration environments. These networked integration environments host collections of integration-oriented services (translation, transformation, orchestration, business process execution) that can be composed to resolve an integration scenario.*1

Third, integration and SOA share underlying technologies and application infrastructure. Examples of common technologies are XML, Web Services, messaging, and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Examples of common application infrastructure are application servers, Web Services platforms, messaging infrastructure and enterprise service buses (ESB).*2

Within the common application infrastructure, this year we have been closely following the enterprise service bus space. Initially, our interest in the ESB was as a backbone candidate for the networked integration environment. However, as our research progressed, we widened our ESB lens to include infrastructure services for advanced styles of SOA: event-driven and business-process driven SOA.*3

Our Enterprise Service Bus Evaluation Status

With this dual (integration and SOA) focus, we published a collection of papers and blog posts over the summer to provide education and evaluation assistance on ESBs, and related technologies, such as BPEL and Java Business Integration (JBI).