ESB is merely a starting point for SOA

Submitted by Thomas G. Business Analysts

As the market continues developing the big picture about SOA, many constituents are becoming concerned about the practical issues: how to design a plan to build an SOA, how to identify the business problem, how to build services, and, of course, how to then figure out the infrastructure.

Let's talk about the infrastructure. Many people think that the major component of a SOA infrastructure is the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Various metrics recently quoted by Colleen Frye confirm that an ESB is a major building block for SOA. For example: Gartner revealed that the ESB market expanded most significantly within integration and middleware products in 2005, with 160.7% revenue growth.

Forrester says that most firms use ESB as a point of entry for SOA projects.

Forrester found that 67% of firms with 40,000+ employees will implement SOA this year; 83% of firms are using SOA for internal integration - which will eventually propel ESB adoption.

However, an ESB may not be the ideal starting point for every single SOA project. An SOA affects the entire IT landscape and requires components such as management and governance, human-centric business process management (BPM), a BPEL engine, web services security or business rules products. The CentraSite Community takes into account that SOA is not limited to a certain technology but focuses on HOW these technologies work together. The community features a sponsor pool spanning across many different technologies that are enabled for SOA.

SOA is not built on any single technology. An ESB implementation standalone is merely a starting point.