Federated ESB

An enterprise service bus (ESB) enables a business to make use of a comprehensive, flexible and consistent approach to integration while also reducing the complexity of the applications being integrated. Due to the complex and varying nature of business needs, ESB is an evolutional progression that unifies message oriented, event driven and service oriented approaches for integrating applications and service. Implementing an ESB facilitates greater reuse of IT assets by separating application logics and integration tasks, so you can reduce the number, size, and complexity of integration interfaces. In doing so, you can add or change services with minimal interruption to existing IT environment; reduce cost and risk involved as business changes and new opportunities arise.

However simple or comprehensive your ESB infrastructure needs, IBM has the integration middleware that can meet them.

IBM delivers the most connected SOA for your business by linking together all types of data, applications, protocols and platforms, from sensors, handheld devices and applications to mainframe.

IBM has put the ESB at the heart of its middleware strategy and offers three ESB products:

• WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus: built on WebSphere Application Server for an integrated SOA platform.
• WebSphere Message Broker: built for universal connectivity and transformation in heterogeneous IT environments.
• WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50: purpose-built hardware ESB for simplified deployment and hardened security.

Whichever implementation of an ESB is deployed to connect your business, either individually or in combination provides your business with a flexible connectivity infrastructure to power your SOA.

In the fast changing business environment, most enterprises will have multiple ESBs across business units. As business processes span organizational boundaries, businesses will need to enable integration across ESBs. Service governance, security, and management must be considered in a federated approach. IBM has several products that allow you to extend your ESB(s) into a federated model.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository provides an integrated service metadata repository to govern services and manage service lifecycle. It promotes service visibility, consistency, and decreases service redundancy in your SOA.

IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager propagates across services and federates across domains. Security is "decoupled" from the requesting application and business risk is reduced making security changes tracked.

WebSphere DataPower XML Security Gateway XS40 and XML Accelerator XA35 Appliances extend ESB functionality in a hardware form factor with wirespeed performance to simplify, secure and accelerate your SOA deployment.

IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA enables the management of services as first-class resources. It provides built-in and extensible alerts, situations, workflows and managed mediation primitives to enable powerful automation scenarios.

All ESB implementations should consider core capabilities for a complete ESB infrastructure. IBM has key core products to assist in building an ESB infrastructure.

WebSphere MQ delivers the proven messaging backbone for SOA connectivity spanning across over 80 platform configurations while preserving data integrity end-to-end.

WebSphere Transformation Extender offers universal transformation deployable anywhere in the enterprise, and provides consistent data transformation and validation across any infrastructure with its enterprise and industry packs.

WebSphere Adapters helps you to service-enable packaged applications or other legacy assets so they can participate in an SOA.

One of the benefits of adopting a Service-Oriented Architecture is the ability to start your move to SOA no matter how your business runs today. As the leading provider of proven integration middleware, IBM can provide the ESB capabilities and supporting Federated components you need to implement a Federated model — today.