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In recent years, there have been several technologies attempting to solve these problems such as Enterprise Applicaton Integration (EAI), Business-to-Business (B2B), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Web Services. These solutions addressed some of the integration problems, 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.

The ESB Approach

A standards-based ESB solves the integration problem without the drawbacks of the other solutions. The purpose of an ESB is to facilitate application and process integration by providing distributed processing, intelligent routing, security, and dynamic data transformation. 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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The ESB addresses the disadvantages of existing solutions by creating a standard infrastructure for integration. Point-to-point solutions, where each of n components requires n-1 interfaces for full communication, are replaced by a bus solution where each component requires a single interface to the bus for global communication. An ESB provides distributed messaging, routing, business process orchestration, reliability and security. It also provides pluggable services and, because of the standard bus, these pluggable services can be provided by third parties and still interoperate reliably with the bus.

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