IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) can help you achieve the goal of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). It provides a flexible connectivity infrastructure for integrating applications and services. It is at the heart of an SOA, powering the SOA by reducing the number, size, and complexity of interfaces.

An ESB performs the following between requestor and service:

• Routes messages between services
• Converts transport protocols between requestor and service
• Transforms message formats between requestor and service
• Handles business events from disparate sources

The ESB allows you to focus on your core business by simplifying your applications to focus just on the business tasks they need to perform. It enables you to add new services faster and to change services with minimal impact to existing services.

IBM WebSphere® Enterprise Service Bus (WebSphere ESB) is built on top of WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment. WebSphere ESB inherits WebSphere Application Server qualities of service, with its world class clustering, failover, scalability, and security. Along with these qualities, WebSphere ESB also includes a number of key WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment features, including Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) as a services registry, the Web services Gateway, IBM Tivoli® Access Manager, IBM DB2®, and Edge Components.

In addition, WebSphere ESB provides mediation functions, which can be used together to create integration logic for “smart” connectivity, with intelligent routing and transformation of XML and Web Services-based data structures. WebSphere ESB includes built-in Java™ Message Service (JMS) messaging and interoperability with WebSphere MQ for messaging to more than 80 platforms, as well as a comprehensive clients package for connectivity. The Service Component Architecture (SCA) Programming Model enables ease of use, while Web Services support allows you to incorporate leading edge capabilities.

WebSphere ESB delivers an Enterprise Service Bus that connects applications with standards-based interfaces to power your SOA. Key highlights regarding the product are:

• Provides Web services connectivity, JMS Messaging, and service oriented integration - WebSphere ESB delivers “smart” integration to connect your assets through service oriented interfaces.
• Ease of use - WebSphere Integration Developer is the powerful development tool to use with WebSphere ESB. The tools are easy to use and require minimal programming skills. You don’t have to know Java in order to build integration solutions with this tool it's integrated, interactive and provides a visual development experience.It is simple to develop, build, test, deploy and manage services components as you develop your integration solutions using WebSphere ESB. WebSphere Integration Developer is also the tool used to configure and build solutions using WebSphere Process Server, offering a straightforward way to grow your integration capability to include process level integration.
• Improved time to value - This cost effective solution has support, using a range of adapters, for over hundreds of ISV solutions such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Oracle. Save time and development costs by using pre-built mediations such as XML transformation, content-based routing and message logging.
• Seamless integration with the WebSphere platform – WebSphere ESB is built on the WebSphere Application Server: a world-class Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) foundation providing industry-leading levels of availability, scalability, and performance. Unlike some of our competition, we have the ability to easily move up the stack to solve more complex business problems with WebSphere Process Server, which is built on WebSphere ESB. So you can easily extend to leverage WebSphere Process Server as your business requirements dictate. Furthermore, WebSphere ESB can tightly integrate with IBM Tivoli security and systems management offerings for comprehensive management and monitoring of the flow of information across your business.