IBM has jumped on the bandwagon. In a comprehensive SOA products-and-services push last week, Big Blue joined a list of companies
offering products labeled as ESB (enterprise service bus).
In addition to WebSphere ESB, IBM also rolled out a business process server, modeler, and monitor; a component assembler;
and a set of best practices for SOA.
Until now, IBM had been among the holdouts that had not officially called any of its products ESB. The company has had an
obvious change of heart.
“Customers needed an entry point to be able to do very basic SOA based on a set of Web services,” said Robert LeBlanc, general
manager at WebSphere for the IBM Software Group.
ESB activity in the rest of the industry forced IBM’s hand, said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.
“It looks like the market and customers have compelled IBM to release its own ESB-branded product as a way of offsetting the
increasing noise and competition in the space for those sorts of products,” Schmelzer said.
IBM, however, said it already has had a product in the ESB space. WebSphere Message Broker supports Web services standards
such as SOAP and WSDL as well as communications mechanisms such as BizTalk and Java Message Service. A new version of the
message broker provides advanced ESB capabilities, offering universal connectivity and data transformation.
Another new product, WebSphere Business Modeler Version 6, models processes. An upgrade to an existing product, Version 6
features an enhanced user experience, more analytics and simulation, and collaborative modeling for group-based development.
IBM’s new WebSphere Integration Developer is a GUI-based tool that takes input from Business Modeler and provides for developing
services or leveraging of existing services as part of an SOA. Components are assembled in the product.
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