Catch The Enterprise Service Bus
The buzzword of 2007 in the ESB space will be fabric. You're not just deploying an enterprise service bus, you're building the foundation for an enterprise information fabric through which data is pulled from multiple sources and comes out the other end as information that's ready to be consumed by business analysts--as long as we don't all unravel first.
BEA and webMethods are both pushing the fabric concept, though in BEA's case, this approach appears to be little more than a justification for separating BEA's service-enablement layer from its ESB. In contrast, competing products from CapeClear Software, Fiorona Software, IONA Technologies, Oracle, Software AG and TIBCO all include service enablement in their ESB offerings. Although most of those adapters aren't free, they are at least available on a single platform and don't require a second product to manage access to enterprise application and data sources. But BEA's AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) does bring to the table the notion of virtualization of data sources, and it offers EII-like functionality--something BEA's ESB competitors can't match.
The ESB market is still young and evolving, so 2007 is likely to bring a push toward the inclusion of this EII-like functionality in other ESB products. The impetus will primarily be driven by platform vendors, such as IBM and Sybase, that have previously made acquisitions in this space.
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