How to select an integration solution(ESB) for your enterprise IT

If you are an IT architect responsible for designing your enterprise IT system, you may have already experienced this topic. Modern IT systems consists of so many different systems developed by different vendors with different technology stacks. Even though those are developed independently, those systems should interact with each other to provide a seamless business experience to your stake holders. This is where the challenge of integration comes into the picture. Integrating heterogenous systems is a very complex task and you need to consider so many things before choosing a proper solution. With this blog post, I am going to discuss about the things which you need to consider when choosing an integration solution for your enterprise. I have grabbed some ideas from the following blog post[1] which also describes a similar topic.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/articles/ESB-Integration

Mainly, there are 2 streams of product categories available in the market.

1. Open source software
2. Proprietary software

Following table describes the capabilities of these 2 different streams of products with respect to the facts which we need to consider when choosing an integration solution.

Fact to be considered	Open Source	Proprietary
Usability	Easy to install in few minutes	Complex installations sometimes require consultants to install
	Supports most operating systems	Good documentation
	Easy to play around and explore features	High memory footprint and considerable learning curve
	Low memory footprint
Maintainability and Monitoring	Administration and Monitoring capabilities are not up to the level of proprietary solutions	Powerful visual tools for admin and monitoring which are integrated to the solution
Community	Open source community around respective projects	Less or zero free community
	Own community with lot of free information in terms of blogs, articles, tutorials	Buy support and you get access to forums and other information
Enterprise support	Most of the open source companies earn money by providing support	Pay more and get good support
	Support is provided by engineers who develop the code (WSO2)	If you pay less, then you have to do most of the things by going through forums
	Quick and customer friendly support
Flexibility	Provide customizations pretty quickly	Hard to get features and take more time (even years)
	Quick bug fixes	If you pay more, you have a chance of getting earlier
Functionality	May lack some features	Concrete set of features
	Always improving and improving quickly	Stable releases with fixed road maps
Extensibility	Easy to extend with clear extension points	Do it yourself or pay more and get new components/products
	Your custom code has same privileges as internal code (WSO2)
Connectors	Fully or partially free connectors	Full set of connectors which you need to buy ($$$)
	Supports most of the important applications
Costs	Low and decent pricing	More and more. May increase when the project goes on
Licensing	Business friendly (Apache2) and transparent licensing	Complex price list which is hard to understand till you are charged
	Pay for what you want
	No hidden fees
Vendors	WSO2, Fuse ESB, Mule ESB, Talend ESB, AdroitLogic ESB, Apache ServiceMix	Oracle ESB, IBM Websphere, Tibco, Microsoft BizTalk, SAP NetWeaver PI, Progress Sonic

According to your requirements and budget, you can go for either open source or proprietary solutions.