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Enterprise networks commonly deploy many disparate applications, platforms, and business processes that need to communicate or exchange data with each other. The applications, platforms and processes have non-compatible data formats and non-compatible communications protocols. If an enterprise needs to interface with external systems, the integration problem extends outside of a company to encompass , encompassing its business partners' IT systems and processes as well.

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 lack of low flexibility due to being non-standard implementations.

The 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 provided so each application does not have to address these issues independently and in a proprietary manner; these are standard infrastructure services in an ESB.

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