Cloud App Integration .com

ESB as a Service will emerge as integration option over coming years

The ESB as a Service is not in wide use, but industry leaders believe that the demand for the ESB as a Service will grow rapidly in the next few years.

An ESB, or enterprise service bus, is an integration middleware layer that helps integrate applications written in different languages or frameworks. An ESB as a Service would make the functionality of the ESB available over a public or private network.

We recently talked with CTOs at open source ESB providers WSO2 and MuleSoft about the future of the ESB as a Service. For now, the adoption of the ESB as a Service parallels broader cloud adoption trends.

“Large enterprises are pretty conservative,” said Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2. “But we see that attitude, that people are not willing to do things in the public cloud, is changing.”

Reluctant attitudes toward the ESB as a Service may be in part due to the central role an ESB can play in an application infrastructure. With an ESB as a Service, special steps must be taken to ensure it functions properly. “You need more governance rules around it. You need different security models. And of course you need a pipe back to the enterprise,” said Ross Mason, CTO of MuleSoft.

At WSO2, Fremantle and his team recently launched an ESB as a Service as part of its Stratos Platform as a Service (PaaS) platform. Fremantle said that for now, most implementations of the ESB as a Service occur within a private cloud.

“A lot of our customers are already using Eucalyptus or Ubuntu or VMware Vsphere to build cloud-like infrastructures within their own data centers,” said Fremantle. “We can install this Stratos software onto that infrastructure” Many Eucalyptus implementations also employ the Mule ESB.

The choice to deploy on private cloud reflects the inhibitions many customers have. “A lot of our customers are large enterprises customers still not willing to do integration in the cloud,” said Fremantle. “But they are interested in having the ease of provisioning, the elasticity, and all the other capabilities of an ESB as a Service.”

Widespread adoption of ESB as a Service a few years away

Both men believe that the ESB as a Service is poised to make its way into the public cloud within a few years.

“I think companies that are leading, the early adopters, that can do the technical stuff ahead of everybody else, will be using an ESB in the cloud to do cloud-based integration,” said Fremantle.

“We see a lot of people interested in it,” said Mason. “But not a lot of people buying. That said, it’s important to move fairly quickly because I don’t think the market is moving at a slow rate at all.”

“If you just remember what the Web was like years ago, initially people very nervous about using HTML and Web sites for enterprise applications,” said Fremantle.

“After a while they got so used to using great apps on the Web that they said ‘Why aren’t we doing this ourselves?’”

Sign up for the free CloudAppIntegration.com newsletter!