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EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) middleware has exploded recently. New e-business requirements helped it along because all new customer-facing applications must be connected to legacy applications. Sporting a hub-and-spoke message-broker architecture, EAI solutions include MQSeries but add components for reformatting data at the hub, connecting to specific applications on the spokes and making business-rule decisions on what transactions get routed to which applications. EAI solutions are now deployed as infrastructural integration solutions that maximize reuse of legacy application assets for new internal and external applications. But MOM's involvement isn't the whole story.

Integration isn't the whole story either. Componentized application designs along with trends in component models have bred more new middleware: the application server. In three- or n-tier application architectures, some systems must do the business-logic processing more simply than high-end transaction systems using transaction-processing monitors. Products such as IBM WebSphere and BEA Systems WebLogic application servers have cemented a significant application component reuse model in an infrastructural way.

The single largest factor in the ascendance and evolution of middleware is e-business. Today's middleware solutions focus primarily on externalizing a single organization's applications, both by building new applications in a Webcentric, n-tier architecture using application servers and by using EAI solutions to connect these new applications to back-end systems. However, B2B solutions will be the new arena for innovation. Once everyone discovers that XML is only a new data-formatting approach and not the whole answer to B2B integration, the rest of the middleware required for B2B integration will take off--creating a whole new market for products and experts.

Bruce Robertson is vice president of adaptive infrastructure strategies at Meta Group; he was a senior technology editor at Network Computing for five years. Send comments on this column to him at Bruce.Robertson@metagroup.com.