Feature

Catching the ES Bus

Indian enterprises are adopting enterprise service bus technology to integrate disparate applications, Abhinav Singh.

ESB allows various applications, information sources and processes to interact and deliver business perfomance R Dhamodaran Vice-president and Country Executive, Software Group and Developer Relations, IBM India

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has assumed immense importance for enterprises, which are grappling with the challenge of integrating their disparate application systems. ESB is the backbone layer that can integrate disparate applications to enable the free flow of information across an enterprise. The success of any Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in an enterprise can only be built upon a simplified service infrastructure that includes an integration layer supporting dynamic interactions across services. ESB can help solve the integration needs in an SOA-driven manner by adapting to any inherent heterogeneity that exists in an enterprise’s IT infrastructure. An ESB can also support the SOA goals of shared services, reuse as well as help remove the task of managing service interactions by taking on that responsibility. Organisations such as the Indian Railways and Container Corporation of India are excited about ESB. These corporations are evaluating this technology and have plans to implement it in the near future.

R Dhamodaran, Vice-President and Country Executive, Software Group and Developer Relations, IBM India, says, “ESB is a technology construct that allows various applications, information sources, processes and people, to interact and deliver business performance. Traditionally, such interaction was ‘hard coded’ using custom code and usually revolved around a temporary master database. Moreover proprietary integration tools are expensive.” He adds that this is no longer practical or feasible as business requirements change more frequently than they used to. SOA is being promoted in the industry as the next evolutionary step in software architecture that can help enterprises meet ever more complex challenges. “ESB is the heart of SOA,” says Dhamodaran.

Better cost control

Most ESB deployments are based on open standards, and are considered to be innovative and cost effective. Dhamodaran, of IBM explains, “While it is difficult to estimate the overall differences in costs between an ESB and a proprietary integration hub deployment, on the product procurement- level, savings should be greater than 50 percent.” However, industry pundits feel that proprietary integration hub deployments involve far less effort than open standards-based ESB deployments. This is expected to change over time, as open standards embrace more complex requirements such as support for BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), Security and Transaction State Management.

Better integration

At present different protocols are available and they talk to each other, which in turn has facilitated better implementation of ESB. Dhruv Singhal, Head Professional Services, BEA Systems India says, “Technologies like ESB can help protocols such as HTTP and those that comprise Web Services and talk to each other in a standardised way. This in turn helps enterprises integrate different applications and enable a smooth flow of information across the organisation without changing the basic IT infrastructure.” An ESB has the capability to support multiple standards, which in turn helps it integrate applications in a heterogeneous environment.

Enterprises gear up

It is important for any organisation to provide multiple-levels of value-added services, which can come about only if applications are integrated resulting in the ability to bundle services into a single integrated offering. Picture this—a mobile service provider wants to offer different value-added services such free SMSs with voice connections as a single package to its customers. There might be disparate applications running within the mobile service provider’s network supporting these services. Now the need is to integrate these applications without changing their basic structure so that the mobile service provider is able to manage and control them and offer them to its customer as a single entity—without revamping its network infrastructure.

Solving integration issues

At a very basic level, the IT architectures of disparate systems failed to keep pace with changing business requirements and therefore did not lend themselves to end-to-end business performance management. Enterprises were grappling with the challenge of leveraging their existing applications or information assets. With disparate applications in place, the need to support diverse integration requirements and the need to allow incremental implementation or migration of application assets had also not been met.

Streamlining information

ESB also helps customers get value-added information, which otherwise was restricted to the data centre. For instance, a logistics company has a set of track and trace application running at its data centre.

Initially, when the applications were installed, access to them was restricted to people working in the data centre. In case a customer wanted to know the delivery status, one had to call the data centre to dig out that information. With ESB, it is possible to integrate the applications and make them available to the customers directly through their Web browsers.

Singhal explains, “By applying an ESB layer on top of the different applications running in an enterprise it is possible to do much more with the existing IT infrastructure and to utilise it to the optimum level. It has also become possible for enterprises to offer different levels of service to customers. All this will help enterprises respond to market requirements quickly and to stay ahead of the competition.”

Huge adoption expected

Adoption of ESB is expected to be driven by changing business needs, increase in IT application programming and deployment costs. ESB technology will be typically applicable in scenarios where business requirements entail complex multi-vendor application deployments such as seen in banking and financial services, telecom and the government. ESB is also applicable where an organisation has of legacy or redundant applications and is working with new application deployments thereby creating complex integration requirements.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com