| Across all industries, executives are demanding more value from their strategic business processes. What process is strategic to a given company may vary dramatically by industry, but a common theme is that CEOs want their IT organizations to measurably improve the flow of data and information driving key business decisions. Whether it's a financial services firm seeking a competitive advantage by guaranteeing a higher volume of faster foreign exchange trades, a retail chain looking to accelerate the flow of store data back to brand managers at corporate headquarters, or a building materials supplier striving to optimize order flow through a complex distribution chain, there are common and significant technical challenges to be overcome. Information is locked up in applications within different departments and organizations, and it is both time-consuming and costly to pry that data loose. In short, the enterprise is far from integrated. The past several years have seen some significant technology trends, such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business-to-Business (B2B), and web services. These technologies have attempted to address the challenges of improving the results and increasing the value of integrated business processes, and have garnered the widespread attention of IT leaders, vendors, and industry analysts. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) draws the best traits from these and other technology trends. The ESB concept is a new approach to integration that can provide the underpinnings for a loosely coupled, highly distributed integration network that can scale beyond the limits of a hub-and-spoke EAI broker. An ESB is a standards-based integration platform that combines messaging, web services, data transformation, and intelligent routing to reliably connect and coordinate the interaction of significant numbers of diverse applications across extended enterprises with transactional integrity. An extended enterprise represents an organization and its business partners, which are separated by both business boundaries and physical boundaries. In an extended enterprise, even the applications that are under the control of a single corporation may be separated by geographic dispersion, corporate firewalls, and interdepartmental security policies. |
