The great ESB squabble of 2005

Both my blogmates Dan Farber and Britton Manasco have provided pointers to excellent information on what enterprise service buses (ESBs) are all about. However, there is some confusion -- if not outright sniping -- over who invented ESBs to begin with.

Datamonitor ComputerWire's Jason Stamper picked up on the brewing contention over who invented the ESB. It appears, the article states, that Sonic Software has long described itself as, "the inventor and leading provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB)." But in an interview with ComputerWire, Tibco Software Inc chairman and CEO Vivek Ranadive said: "That's a complete joke. I personally invented it. We've always called ourselves 'The Information Bus Company', and the ESB is no different."

According to the article, Ranadive claims that "Having one server and two clients and claiming you can do an ESB - they [Sonic] don't come near it. You need to have a whole integration stack."

Sonic Software responded by pointing out that Tibco's integration technology is "legacy EAI [enterprise application integration]". Greg O'Connor, president of Sonic Software, pointed out that "Customers are frustrated with the inadequate returns they have achieved with this traditional, centralized hub-and-spoke integration technology. Sonic provides flexible SOA infrastructure out of the box that is helping organizations accelerate their transition to enterprise-wide SOA, and significantly reducing SOA project risk."

Datamonitor added this update to the initial report about the squabble: "The question over just who invented the enterprise service bus, or ESB, saw another dramatic twist yesterday as Gartner's most senior middleware analyst, Roy Schulte, told ComputerWire that it was Candle Corp's Roma product of 1998 that is the ESB's "most direct ancestor", but that it was Sonic Software Inc that coined the term."