Can an eight year old product category, which is hotly contested by every middleware vendor, deliver unique and differentiating product offerings? When performing an ESB comparison, you will notice almost all Enterprise Service Bus products support enterprise integration patterns, deliver all required ESB features (i.e. web services, message transformation, protocol mediation, content routing), and offer a graphical development workbench. When technical evaluations focus on core performance and quality of service (i.e .reliability, availability, and scalability), proof of concept workloads must closely mirror expected production profiles and the evaluation effort ideally includes vendor participation.
PROMOTION: WSO2 Advantage Webinar : ESB Evaluation Framework
In this session, Chris Haddad will describe how to create a comprehensive evaluation framework that considers your requirements, constraints, and technology strategy.
A team comparing ESB offerings may choose to create a comprehensive ESB evaluation framework, and delineate required and optional features. To further distinguish vendor offerings and separate exceptional from commodity, your ESB comparison process may review strategic platform fit and architecture. Table 1 below compares open source ESB offerings and a leading proprietary vendor across SOA platform fit and ESB architecture attributes.
| WSO2 ESB and SOA Platform | Mule ESB | Adroit Logic UltraESB | JBoss ESB and SOA Platform | Tibco ActiveMatrix | ||
| Supports Enterprise Integration Patterns | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Delivers all required ESB features (i.e. web services, message transformation, protocol mediation, content routing) |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Offers a complete and cohesive SOA Platform (i.e. ESB, Message Broker, Governance Registry, Business Process Server, Data Services Server, Application Server) |
Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| SOA Governance | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Graphical ESB Development Workbench | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Based on a composable architecture | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Cloud integration platform offering (iPaaS) | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
| Cloud Connectors and Legacy Adapters | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Performance | High | Moderate | Moderate | High | Moderate | High |
| Security and Identity Management | Yes | Limited | Limited | Limited | Limited | Limited |
| Open Business Model | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Table 1.0: ESB Comparison Scorecard
When validating an ESB evaluation framework, a few online resources can be helpful. In particular, an open source ESB comparison presentation by OpenLogic and the Forrester Wave: Enterprise Service Bus Q1 2011. If you require high performance, check out the latest ESB performance benchmarks.
PROMOTION: WSO2 Advantage Webinar : ESB Evaluation Framework
In this session, Chris Haddad will describe how to create a comprehensive evaluation framework that considers your requirements, constraints, and technology strategy.
As you compare open source ESBs, you should add two other ones: Switchyard (new JBoss ESB) and Talend ESB.
Switchyard will probably replace JBoss ESB and Fuse ESB (because FuseSource was acquired by Red Hat). Talend ESB is a really powerful and stable open source ESB.
Btw: Both use my favorite integration framework Apache Camel inside
Best regards,
Kai Wähner (Twitter: @KaiWaehner)
Hi Kai, we’ll see how the Red Hat product strategy plays out. I have been holding back from promoting FUD in the market on whether SwitchYard, JBoss ESB, or Fuse ESB will supplant each other in the short, medium, and long term. Acquisitions yielding duplicative products require strong leadership to rationalize the portfolio. Jury is out on where Red Hat will continue long-term investment.
When considering the long term prospect of the open source ServiceMix ESB technology, I would personally be wary of the recent FuseSource acquisition by Red Hat. Red Hat now has three overlapping ‘ESB’ offerings, and probably should consolidate their development focus:
Readers and view the following articles and blogs describing the on-going conjecture:
http://blog.c2b2.co.uk/2012/07/red-hat-acquires-fusesource.html
http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/feature/Red-Hat-makes-a-switch-SwitchYard-project-to-replace-JBoss-ESB#.UBAY-ISClZI.wordpress
http://whywebsphere.com/2012/07/25/red-hat-makes-a-switch-switchyard-project-to-replace-jboss-esb/
Because the ESB market has been around for more than eight years, several open source ESB offerings exist, and base ESB features (i.e. protocol mediation, message transformation, content routing, service hosting, security mediation) could be considered commodity. While Camel exposes an excellent Java/XML DSL, a full integration offering may require more than the base framework.
I welcome hearing your thoughts.
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