BEA, Cape Clear claim no. 1 ESB spot

Forrester Research just published its latest quarterly report on the ESB market, and both BEA Systems and Cape Clear Software are claiming the top spot in the rankings.

To avoid more confusion than already reigns in the ESB space, Forrester defines an ESB as "infrastructure software that makes reusable business services widely available to users, applications, business processes, and other services."

Forrester rated vendors on a 1 to 5 scale, and Cape Clear received the highest marks in the areas of strategic alliances (5), corporate strategy (5), and control and change (4.9).

BEA, a bigger company, received "5s" in product strategy and vision, corporate strategy, and financial viability. BEA's latest product in this space is the AquaLogic Service Bus.

IBM, an even bigger company which entered the ESB market last September -- received six "5s" across a range of categories, made the top six list, but lost out to Cape Clear and BEA in the weighting of the categories.

Forrester divided the ESB market into three major groups:

• Startup ESB specialists: Cape Clear, PolarLake
  
• Integration vendors: IONA, TIBCO, Vitria, webMethods, Sonic Software, Fiorano, Software AG
  
• Platform vendors: BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Software AG, Sun Microsystems

Forrester gave a hearty endorsement to ESBs, describing them as "the most straightforward way to get started with service-oriented integration today. ESBs are also typically less costly than other ways of doing integration, such as integration-centric business process management suites."

The consultancy cited easier configuration, standards support, and lower costs. "ESB prices typically range from $10,000 to $75,000 per server, which is less than half the cost of [process management suites]. [Process management suites] have broader features than ESBs, but they are overkill for many SOA projects."

(Cape Clear provides a download link to copies of the Forrester ESB report here.)