Is open source remaking the ESB market?

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, said both pure play vendors suffered from a failure to gain traction for their ESB in the SOA marketplace.

“Iona and Cape Clear are clearly examples of a broader consolidation trend in the industry,” he said, “but in their particular cases, it’s more examples of better technology that both vendors were unable to market and sell effectively enough to grow their business sufficiently.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

The Integration Potential and Problems of ESBs

In short, it’s a middleware for all your little middlewares, an irony that wasn’t lost on a ZapThink senior analyst at the time. InfoWorld quotes Ronald Schmelzer as saying:

“SOA Software’s Network Director looks like middleware for your middleware play. ESBs for ESBs, enterprise middleware integration. A plot that never ends. But Network Director obviates the need for an ESB in the first place – if you have proper service intermediation, who needs an ESB in the first place?”

Read more at: IT Business Edge

Are stacks making SOA a ‘complex, hard to use beast’?

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC, also sees the danger of middleware oversell in the stack approach.

Annrai definitely has a point,” Bloomberg said. “Many software vendors have pounced on SOA as a way to sell more software, middleware in particular. But the fact of the matter is, SOA is something you do, not something you buy. Furthermore, enterprises generally don’t need much more middleware to implement SOA. After all, most of them already have plenty of middleware.”

Bloomberg warns that potential customers need to consider options when approached by salesman selling an SOA stack, which he notes may also be called an SOA suite or SOA platform in marketing-ese.

“They should ask themselves what they will need to do to integrate that stack into their current environment,” he said. “Will they be required to rip and replace older middleware? Do they need to drop into hand coding to perform the integration? And worst of all, will they need to buy more middleware to integrate their new middleware into their old? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then the question I have for them is, what’s service-oriented about that? Answer: nothing!”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

ESB market report

“The real question is, how can an ESB help with a SOA implementation plan, which is the challenge a lot of enterprises face,” said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “Companies need to think through a plan, identify the business problem, figure out how to build services, then figure out the infrastructure. They may or may not need an ESB.”

As the larger vendors have added ESB capabilities to their offerings, the pureplays have broadened their capabilities as well. “Look at Sonic Software,” said Bloomberg. “They’re still leading with their ESB product, but Progress Software [Sonic's corporate parent] has reorganized. It’s significant that Progress has realized SOA is more than ESB. They have the Neon legacy integration, they have XML tooling. SOA requires a lot of different pieces. Sonic’s leading standalone ESB product is really not standalone anymore. Companies want a more comprehensive solution.”

According to ZapThink’s Bloomberg, “A key part of the SOA infrastructure has to do with the intermediary capability for loose coupling of services. If your existing middleware can’t do that, bring in some intermediary. If you have the need for additional integration infrastructure, get an ESB. If you already have that infrastructure you can use an intermediary, like SOA Software’s Network Director. The question is, do I need messaging infrastructure in addition to intermediary capabilities?”

“What we’re seeing from ESB vendors as well as consultants building SOA solutions, is that the bloom is off the ESB rose,” said Bloomberg. “Clearly the role of ESB is no longer thought of as a key piece of SOA infrastructure, but rather one piece of many moving parts to get SOA to work.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

NetManage and Cape Clear Software Announce Strategic SOA Partnership

“Implementing SOA to stay agile and capable of responding to change, while capitalizing on the value of essential corporate data and critical business logic stored on the mainframe, is a significant challenge in today’s dynamic business environment,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink. “The partnership between NetManage and Cape Clear provides enterprises with a clear and effective path to support vital SOA initiatives that leverage legacy assets.”

Read more at: NetManage Press Release

Making Sense of SOA Governance, Service Lifecycle Management, Registries & Repositories

The Service-oriented architecture (SOA) marketplace is experiencing substantial flux, as enterprises hammer out their SOA initiatives, and vendors position their offerings to meet their customers’ needs. One particularly dynamic corner of this broader market is the SOA governance segment. The vendors in the SOA governance space actually position themselves into one or more of the following market niches: registry/repository products, policy management tools, Service lifecycle management platforms, or SOA governance tools. Even though these segments are in flux, they all share a core capability: the ability to manage the metadata that form the lifeblood of every SOA implementation.

IT companies are hooking up like divorcees at a Vegas wedding chapel

The ZapThink guys have it right that this is only the second inning (given the weather, it can’t be too soon for baseball metaphors) of a nine-inning outing of SOA components and supplier consolidation.

Read more at: ZDnet

2005: The year SOA broke big

In fact, ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer believes the SOA product development rate has become so intense that IT shops run high risks if they don’t get on board.

“If you’re not doing SOA, you’re in serious danger,” he said. “Every sizable software vendor has stated its future roadmap is going to be SOA related. If you don’t adopt SOA, you could be cutting yourself off and not be able to upgrade your current applications.”

“All of these companies are piling into this real weird bandwagon,” Schmelzer said. “ESB is a problematic term that was sickly in 2005 and I think it’s going to die in 2006.”

Read more at: Search400.com

Cape Clear Joins Eclipse

“Cape Clear joining Eclipse is probably notable only in that it shows that Eclipse has reached the point where it’s now the default IDE of choice for most vendors,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC., in Waltham, Mass. “Indeed, there is very little value in startup and emerging technology vendors developing their own IDE, so I think we’re finally at that point.”

Read more at: eWeek

IBM Unveils First ESB Tool for SOA Product Line

IBM had long maintained that an ESB was merely a design concept rather than a specific product, but it apparently took to heart user pressure to supply one, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. An ESB is described as a broker that manages interactions among applications to form a business process.

Schmelzer said IBM crafted its “entry-level ESB” by repackaging “their enterprise messaging capabilities with some business process capabilities and standards-based interfaces” and making the result lightweight.

Overall, Schmelzer said, the new offerings increase IBM’s ability to provide users with an infrastructure to build SOAs.

Read more at: ComputerWorld