Unlock the Reasons Why Organizations Can Rely On ESB to Integrate Applications

by Adeptia Inc Self-Service Data Integration

Currently, the business landscape dynamics are changing rapidly. With the number of systems, applications, devices, processes, technologies etc. increasing at a faster pace, the need to connect them has risen. Such disparate applications and systems can be connected with the help of integration solutions. So, deploying integration architecture that fosters seamless communication and improved connectivity across the organizational ecosystems have become a necessity nowadays. One such system architecture is ESB.

However, the task of integrating such multiple applications is not as easy as it sounds, and so it is easy for organizations to get lost in the clouds of confusion created by marketing acronyms.

After a great deal of research, we have curated this blog to help you gain insight into ESB design patterns and architecture and understand how it proves extremely useful in integrating numerous applications together.

ESB

Fundamentally an architecture, ESB encompasses a set of rule and regulations for integrating multiple applications over a bus-like infrastructure. Companies can make use of ESB to integrate myriad applications by using a communication bus which allows each application to communicate with the bus. This eliminates the need for systems to communicate with each other, thus decoupling them to communicate without knowledge of other applications or systems on the bus. In other words, ESB allows applications to connect indirectly instead of connecting them directly with each other.

The main reason why ESB has become popular is that it has replaced point to point integration, which is brittle and handle to manage over time. With a central bus to monitor or troubleshoot, ESB does not form “spaghetti code”, fostering agility and flexibility in the organization.

Apart from this ESB offers a number of other benefits such as:

1. ESB allows enterprises to increase their agility by alleviating time to market for new initiatives. This is perhaps the main reason why ESB is used as the backbone of organizational IT infrastructure.

2. With a well-defined, pluggable system in place, ESB plays a central role in helping companies scale. It also offers companies a way to leverage their existing systems and expose them to new applications with the help of primary transformation and communication capabilities.

3. It enables companies integrate their applications and systems using a single, standardized platform. ESB empowers developers and IT teams to create a robust enterprise-wide framework, use –industry-best practices for streamlining reusable services and creating myriad patterns. When a unified platform such as an ESB is absent, companies can experience confusion and difficulty as to how to execute integration, raising the cost of management and greatly increasing inconsistency. Relying on ESB, on the other hand, can bolster companies’ capability to support their own enterprise standards.

4. ESB allows users enable:

Physical decoupling: Physical decoupling is permitted with access to message passing mechanisms such as JMS. This is better than creating direct connections with the help of protocols like HTTP.

Semantic decoupling: Semantic decoupling is enabled to depict services in a system-neutral format. This reduces the application lock-in risk and cost of the damage as well.

5. ESB pattern is such that it offers message routing capability to organizations. With this feature, companies can support fault tolerance and scalability. ESB can be used to streamline business level routing and mediation. For instance, the content-based routing mechanism invokes services based on the service request content.

6. Organizations can use ESB architecture to evade the risk of forming rigid and complicate connections that very tedious to scale. Consequently, companies can increase customer delight, thereby grabbing a larger market share.

7. ESB offers a loosely coupled architecture that is easier to scale. It offers other important benefits including, high-availability and load balancing. With a message layer, ESB can direct messages between endpoints easily.

Companies with an aim to increase agility and time-to-market for fresh initiatives need to employ a lightweight ESB. With a well-defined pluggable system, it allows organizations to integrate their applications and systems that can scale. However, with so many options in the market, selecting one is daunting. Make sure to evaluate your requirements, budget, and end-objectives prior to choosing an ESB vendor for you.

Use ESB solutions to create an architecture based on speed and agility today!