Getting on Board the Enterprise Service Bus

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is getting their diverse applications, often built on different platforms, to work together when necessary. To accomplish this, companies must implement effective application integration flexibly, quickly, and easily. Businesses initially turned to manual integration and then enterprise application integration (EAI) but subsequently have focused on service-oriented architectures. To leverage SOAs' benefits effectively, companies are beginning to use an approach known as the enterprise service bus, offered by a growing number of large and small vendors. ESB is the middleware glue that holds an SOA together and enables communication between Web-based enterprise applications. However, ESB also faces challenges, such as implementation costs and complex migration and management