A Long Bus Ride, Lots of Transfers

Gartner vice president and analyst Roy Schulte, who has been tracking service-oriented IT since before the days of CORBA, feels a new headache coming on. This pain comes in the form of enterprise service buses, or ESBs -- the logical layers where application components from different systems can meet and mingle, as reported by TechTarget's Jon Panker. Trouble is, you can't run out and buy an ESB, Schulte told this week's Application Integration and Web Services Summit held by Gartner. Instead, most vendors will embed ESBs into their tools, suites, and applications. Microsoft will include an ESB in the Longhorn version of Windows. The net result? Lots of ESBs that will have to be integrated and managed.
IBM's and other vendors' long-range plans for ESB were also explored by in a recent article by CNET's Martin LaMonica.