The Enterprise Service Bus has been an integral component of TIBCO’s approach to software from the beginning. After all, the company’s name is shorthand for “The Information Bus Company.”
TIBCO’s CEO and Chairman Vivek Ranadivé got straight to the heart of the matter in a recent interview, when he spoke about the necessity for a real-time “nervous system” at the center of enterprise IT. As Vivek explains further, you start to add muscles to this system with Business Process Management (BPM) as you develop your new, flexible SOA and get up to real-time, even predictive, speed in whatever competitive market you find yourself in.
ESB serves as the digital nervous system that Vivek outlines. And now it looks like the ESB approach is gaining traction beyond its well-established high-end base.
As Joe McKendrick recently put it, “ESBs have typically had more in common with limousines than mass-transit vehicles, (but now) are increasingly moving into the mid-market space.” Joe, in turn, based his observation on a recent Information Week article by Andy Dornan, which identifies ESB as one of four key SOA technologies (the others being governance, runtime management, and security gateways) in the author’s look at the future of SOA.
It’s easy enough to find innumerable abstruse debates about ESB: what it is, what it does, what it should do, whether it’s a gateway or part-and-parcel of SOAs, etc. I find these debates to be interesting and generally useful, but not very productive unless they focus on the key reasons to place the ESB in the center of enterprise IT: getting your company off its addiction to a database-oriented architecture (DOA), and liberating your processes and services into an architecture that is efficient, flexible, and can function in at least real-time.
I also agree with Joe–ESB is a mass-transit vehicle for mid-size companies as well as the Global 1000. Flexibility and agility should be available to anyone who needs it. With TIBCO, they are. Our continued leadership in developing ESB as a key enabler in the fast-growing world of SOAs encompasses a “big tent” approach in helping you move from DOA to SOA.
