Tuesday, September 13, 2005

IBM Ships ESB

IBM has announced that they have an ESB - and will be shipping it within the month.

Yesterday was a busy day talking with IBM personnel about the ESB and their new WebSphere Process Server. Naturally, I voiced a few concerns about calling it an ESB but if anyone can create a category, it is IBM.

What I heard was a couple interesting comments:
- Don't concern yourself with SOAP over MQ
- We agree, it isn't about JMS
- Don't worry about the protocols, we'll add'em in later

Hmm. If a WS-startup were to have told me this I would have gone off - however, this wasn't - it was IBM. Big blue customers will buy this. They will build on endpoints and mediate in the middle.

I remain disappointed in the lack of clarity around the ESB but am happy to see IBM put some new weight behind their SOA marketing. Congratulations to the IBM teams for getting these products out the door on schedule.

Our customers have been asking us for an ESB evaluators offering which is now available. Send an email to webservices@momentumsi.com. In addition, we'll be putting the IBM ESB into the MomentumSI SOA lab as soon as we can. We remain committed to pushing vendors towards the next generation of standards and pointing out those that are stuck in the J2EE world.

Pop Quiz: WebSphere was the IBM J2EE/Component brand; What is the IBM SOA brand?

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