IBM's ESB plans emerge

Over the next 12 to 18 months IBM plans to begin introducing a series of products that will help solidify its ESB (enterprise service bus) strategy.

The technologies will more closely integrate IBM's messaging protocols with its high-level integration tools to form a single infrastructure. The first of these will come late this year or in early 2005 in the form of a yet-to-be-named server that will be a member of IBM's WebSphere lineup.

"This convergence is an attempt to reconcile into a single infrastructure all the low-level messaging protocols such as JMS, MQ, IIOP. Step two is to converge key application integration tools such as sophisticated message transformation and business process management into what they refer to as WebSphere Business Integration Version 6.0," said one source familiar with the company's plans.

Another source close to the company said that over the next eight to 10 months IBM will deliver new server-based products and tools where integration process capabilities will converge with messaging via a "next-generation approach using service-oriented technologies based on richer Web services standards."

"This notion of an ESB connecting to an SOA is very important because there is a plethora of standards and protocols that would be part of a real enterprise messaging system. It is hard work," said Stephen O'Grady, senior analyst at RedMonk.

Over the past year IBM has been shipping pieces of technology that developers could use to create their own ESB, including WebSphere Business Integration Broker, Event Broker, the Interchange Server it acquired from CrossWorldsand the WebSphere Business Integration Workbench.

The company has also bundled a number of messaging technologies into its WebSphere Application Server such as JMS, and support for SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL.

"Instead of a separate stack for MQSeries, another for JMS and a third stack for Web services, they will put together a unified infrastructure by the end of 2005 that combines all these things to provide message routing and message transformation among all these protocols,"said a source familiar with the company's plans.

Sources said once the unified architecture is in place, everything in that environment will "look like a Web service no matter what the protocol."

Some observers have called IBM late to the ESB game against competitors such as Sonic Software, Iona, webMethods, and Cape Clear. Sonic, for instance, last week said that this spring it plans to release version 5.5 of its Sonic ESB with fault-tolerant features.

Over the longer term some observers see Microsoft's upcoming Indigo technology being a serious competitor for IBM's ESB.

"Indigo is an ESB architecture very similar to what IBM wants to do like multiple protocol support and [protocol] transformation. Indigo under Longhorn was to come out in 2006 but with Microsoft thinking of releasing it for Windows 2000 and XP, it could bring [IBM's and Microsoft's] ESB products into competition no later than 2005,"said one source familiar with the company's plans.