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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. 

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Comments

  1. PriyaDecember 18, 2019 at 2:51 AM

    Thanks for sharing this blog.The article you provided here about"How to select an integration solution(ESB) for your enterprise IT" gives lot of information.
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  2. bhanuDecember 24, 2021 at 1:59 AM

    Thanks for sharing valuable blog.
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