ESB and SOA

The implementation of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become the goal and guiding principle for countless enterprise architects. Many organizations have installed governance to ensure that all projects are implemented under guidelines intended to promote standardized service contracts, service reusability, and loose coupling.

Unfortunately, the pursuit of SOA/ESB has often put the strategic direction of the IT department at odds with the developers in the trenches. Those who are responsible for delivery of business-driven IT initiatives find themselves hamstrung, rather than helped, by these constraints.

Service Oriented Architecture is not a flawed concept. However, there have been significant growing pains associated with service-enabling legacy applications and traditionally closed systems. As a result, strategic SOA/ESB projects often cost more, take longer, and leave business users less satisfied than a “tactical” implementation with identical functional requirements.

The PilotFish eiPlatform and eiConsole allow the Enterprise Architect to align the strategic implementation of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with the goals of the business.

Unlike other SOA/ESB middleware, the eiPlatform and eiConsole were developed in the process of implementing real-world interfaces. Blue-sky middleware concepts drawn up on whiteboards in sterile rooms have resulted in feature-bloated software that cannot be easily adapted to real-world IT environments. They contain too many features that you simply do not need, and ignore many of the gritty realities (e.g., legacy applications) of a typical IT infrastructure. In contrast, the eiConsole and eiPlatform have evolved over a decade of iterative development, resulting in a time-tested, battle-hardened solution.

The eiConsole and eiPlatform provide all of the connectivity, transformation, monitoring, and management tools needed to deploy an Enterprise Service Bus successfully and to realize a Service Oriented Architecture. The eiConsole provides an assembly-line approach that eliminates the clutter of unnecessary complexity while retaining unlimited flexibility and extensibility.

IT departments can now move towards a loosely-coupled, service-enabled environment without compromising the immediate needs of the business. With the eiConsole and eiPlatform, even the 1st service-oriented application interface will be delivered faster, better, and more cost-effective than a tactical point-to-point solution.