Sea change in integration coming from SOA/ESB

The terms SOA (services orientated architecture) and ESB (enterprise service bus) are “drastically over-used”, although beneath the hyperbole there’s “a sea change” in integration driven by the emergent architecture. So says Calum Nobles, technical director at integration adapters and business intelligence software and services provider Information Builders. “They’re both good but they mean nothing,” he says. “Manufacturers have been dealing with the complexities of integration for a long time, particularly business-to-business integration. “A lot of companies looking retrospectively will say they’ve already got an SOA. Much of supply chain automation already takes that approach, so manufacturers roll their eyes a bit when vendors talk about SOA.” Nobles believes that the SOA approach, driven largely by software architects in the IT vendor community, is key to the new world of integration. “The big change in integration is an acceptance by everyone that, when you want to link an extended enterprise where the boundaries start to blur, the old ‘hub and spoke’ approach to integration can’t scale or give the flexibility you need. It produces a bottleneck of its own. So the services approach is then very radical but very essential.” And the same goes for redesigning, streamlining and automating business processes to make a company more efficient and flexible. “You have to be able to service-enable or ‘wrapper’ all those legacy applications that are your existing investment in IT and business process automation,” he says. “It’s about low level orchestration to turn information and events from application semantics to business semantics. You need to be able to glue together and expose what then become application services so you get a much more agile system that can respond to changing business requirements quickly rather than joining a big queue for the IT department.”