ESB Defined

December 5, 2005

ESB Defined, or the Definitive ESB?

The enterprise software industry is an exciting world in which to work: rife with innovation, constantly changing, instinctively resisting the temptation to become more like traditional, stable and (some might say) boring industries. These characteristics often give entrepreneurs and business leaders of technology companies hubris. We get carried away with excitement about cool technology we've cooked up, and lose sight of how confusing we can be to customers and prospects.

In the software industry, it is easy to copy the innovations of others and offer customers what appears to be an equivalent product. At the beginning of such replication, the one that suffers most is the customer, who is left to spend cycles trying to decipher the true differentiators across a spectrum of like-sounding claims.

Thus is the situation in the market where Sonic innovates and competes - the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) market. We consider ESB critical to a strategic transition being undertaken from traditional, monolithic business application approaches to the coarse-grained, loosely-coupled, services-based approach of service-oriented architecture (SOA). We believe that this transition will eliminate certain legacy technologies for business integration, and create dramatic new opportunities for innovation and business performance improvement.

We were the first to bring an ESB product to market: Sonic ESB®, nearly four years ago. We have over 250 customers, most of them global enterprises, who are building out their strategic SOA infrastructure on Sonic ESB today. We moved first. So it is incumbent upon us not to exacerbate the creation of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) as customers seek clarity in a market with clear benefits yet considerable confusion. It is incumbent upon us to shed light, to continue to lead, and to clearly and completely set the standard in our space.

Today, Sonic publishes "Sonic ESB: An Architecture and Lifecycle Definition." This document establishes a baseline for what has become an enterprise-critical, but murky, new product category. We offer the detailed explication of our market-creating offering, Sonic ESB, as the foundation for an industry-wide discussion and debate. We intend to trigger this debate in order to eliminate confusion and establish a clear vocabulary for vendors and their customers alike to begin a new discourse. It presents an unvarnished picture of the significant and sophisticated moving parts of an enterprise-grade SOA infrastructure.

We welcome comments and feedback on the definition document - including those we have already received about which vendor-neutral body should carry this initiative forward.

Tim Dempsey
Vice President, Marketing
Sonic Software - The inventor and leading provider of the ESB

The Sonic ESB:
An Architecture and Lifecycle Definition

An overview of the function and benefit of key ESB elements
more>

A formal definition of the ESB, including a complete set of UML class diagrams
pdf >

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Progress Software Corporation supplies business application platform, soa infrastructure and data infrastructure software that simplifies and accelerates the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Our superior business application platforms include Progress OpenEdge for high performance SOA integration and software as a service (SaaS), and Progress Apama for complex event processing. Our innovative event-driven SOA infrastructure solutions include Progress Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Progress DataXtend semantic data integrator, Progress Actional SOA management and SOA governance, and DataDirect data connectivity for mainframe SOA and web services. Our data infrastructure products include DataDirect Connect for database driver and data provider connections to relational databases and XML data integration, EasyAsk for enterprise search and e-commerce, and ObjectStore object data management.

Our Progress Sonic product line includes standards-based enterprise application integration software that enables companies to build agile and effective event-driven SOA deployments. Sonic ESB, the industry's first enterprise service bus, reliably connects, mediates and orchestrates services. SonicMQ is enterprise messaging middlware that delivers continuous availablility. Sonic products deliver the core SOA infrastructure solutions for companies who support a federated or distributed environments that require end-to-end visibility of business events.