Welcome to Enterprise Service Bus. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Being part of a new technology evolution is very exciting, and now that you are beginning to explore the concept of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), you can become a part of it, too. The ESB provides a highly distributed, event-driven Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that combines Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), web services, intelligent routing based on content, and XML data transformation. ESBs are being used to solve integration challenges in many unique ways, as we will explore throughout this book.