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In the past several years there have been several technologies attempting to solve these problems such as Enterprise Applicaton Integration (EAI) ¹ , Business-to-Business (B2B) ² , Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) ³ , and Web Services. ⁴. These solutions addressed some of the integration issues, but were proprietary, expensive, and time-consuming to implement. These solutions range from expensive vendor solutions (high cost, vendor lock-in) to home-grown custom solutions (high maintenance, high cost). The overwhelming disadvantages of these solutions are high cost and low flexibility due to non-standard implementations.

A standards based ESB solves the integration problem without the flaws of the other solutions. The purpose of an ESB is to facilitate application and process integration by providing distributed processing, intelligent routing ⁵ , security, and dynamic data transformation. ⁶. In an ESB these services are infrastructure services so each application does not have to implement these requirements independently and in a proprietary manner.

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An ESB also supports requirements such as security, orchestration ⁷ , and transactionality. ⁸. These exist in "hard-wired" integration methods, but are not automatically available in a service-oriented architecture. One of the key requirements for the ESB is to give loosely coupled service-based integration methods a level of enterprise-class reliability and security.

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