Integration Suite

An Integration suite offers a complete components and all the features of middleware including an ESB. In addition, many other features such as Business Process Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring, Master Data Management, or a Repository and Rules are included. If some of these additional features are required in addition to pure integration, then the use of a suite is advisable.

Enterprise Service Bus

What is “Enterprise Service Bus”
ESB is the modern world application integration platform which completely supports and enables message oriented middleware.  It can transform and route the messages in different ways based on contents of the message and routing logic. ESB provides flexible and loosely coupled integration solution for the applications to post messages to the ESB and the ESB will handle the rest.

The great advantage of ESBs over the use of pure frameworks or Integrations Suite is therefore to reduce the cost and complexity significantly. Integration problems are solved at a higher abstraction level.

 

Integration Framework with EIP

A framework helps implementing Enterprise Integration Patterns(EIP) faster by reusing/building the same integration solution/requirement and keeps applications in a standardized way. Using EIP’s to integrate applications, lowers the implementation efforts and makes solutions robust. A framework helps to integrate different applications using different protocols, technologies, interfaces, endpoints, producer, consumer and EIPs are used to create the integration logic.

• With frameworks the development team is more or less solely responsible for the project’s success.
• Commercial support is generally not available.
• Tooling is also only partly available, and not necessarily suitable for “mission-critical” deployments.

 

Isn’t ESB it sounding so simple to you? in fact it is.

Basically ESB falls between a framework and an Integration suite. unless you understand what are different products and vendors available in the market to implement “Enterprise Service Bus”. Almost every vendor of proprietary integration products, such as IBM and Oracle, offers middleware integration suites and tools. Perhaps the most important open-source offerings are Mule ESB and WSO2 ESB.

Let’s use below table to compare and choose the right ESB or suite.

 

Comparing different ESB products together

 

OSB (Oracle SOA Suite)	Mule ESB	WSO2 ESB
It is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) stack	Mulesoft is pure ESB.	A full suite that is based on a single code base Apache Synapse (lightweight ESB), Axis (Web Service Implementation) into its component and a single development environment
Many other companion products are available in it, for example, the BPEL, Coherence, Complex Event Processing, Business Rules, Enterprise Messaging Service, Service Registry, and many more.	Mule ESB has to be combined with products from other vendors for additional features.	WSO2 provides the entire range of companion products of a suite including Business Process Server, Business Rules Server, Business Activity Monitor, Governance Registry, API Manager.
The tools are very powerful and stable over years. Eclipse and Jdeveloper based development.	Mulesoft ESB development is through Anypoint Studio (Proprietary). With Inbuilt Server, Debugger, Monitoring Capabilities. One Click propagation to dev-prod servers	The entire WSO2 platform can be installed very easily and offers a lightweight, Eclipse-based development studio
Graphical editors exist for most products for easy drag and drop job.	Graphical editors for an efficient implementation of integration scenarios.	A weakness is the graphical tooling. It supports all components of the platform, but it is not as intuitive to use as the tooling of its competitors.
Connectors and Adapters Available, supports most of application integration needs. Custom connector development possible.	Mostly all the standard connectors for B2B products such as SAP or Salesforce are available. Provides on Anypoint Connector (Out-of-the-box Devkit) for custom connector development.	Numerous SOAP, REST, Java API based connectors. All most all the standard connectors Amazon, Twilio, Twitter, Salesforce, JIRA etc. are available. Fully supports to develop custom Connectors.
Support is available at different service level agreements.	Apart from the free open-source version, a commercial enterprise version is available. This offers additional functionality and support for the product.	Apart from the free open-source version, product support available through Change Request or tickets. For that matter can work with implementation partners.
High complexity of the products should not be underestimated. Besides, you should be aware of high licensing and support costs plus a non-transparent pricing model.	Prices are customer friendly Nevertheless, the open-source version can be used (even in production) without any licensing costs. the open-source version simply serves for playing around or doing a proof of concept to later upgrade to the enterprise version with additional features and support.	Prices are customer friendly, open-source version fully support s all your production needs, however you only pay for upgrades and additional support for risk free Prod and all other non-prod are totally cost free.
The installation is tedious and can occasionally take more time to build (several days) for simple Development platform installation.	No Installations required, Works as it is through Download and Extract. Quick and easy.	No Installations required, Works as it is through Download and Extract. All the WSO2 products are built on same carbon platform so makes the installations and maintenance very easy.
The products are proprietary and come from multiple acquisitions made by Oracle over time. Which makes it complex.	Built on Proprietary Mule ESB framework.	Products are built on same carbon platform makes it less complex.
The products are rather heavy. Resource consumption at run-time is very high.	Open source ESBs are very lightweight and provides extensible solutions to your middleware needs.	Open source ESBs are very lightweight and provides extensible solutions to your middleware needs.

 

Decision:

Therefore, it is wise and advisable to pre-define your integration needs and then to evaluate each of these products to better suit your needs. It is strongly recommended to perform a proof of concept with a use-case. At times you may need to work with an experienced implementation partner to help you make a final decision.

The challenge is every vendor and partners greatly support and admire their products but nobody would agree to say what lack in their products, and less knowledge about other products, finally you end up working with multiple partners and burn your budgets just to in evaluation phase itself. So you need an Implementation partner who knows all middleware products better and help you optimize your cost and time with their expertise.

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At last, If you are looking for consultants and systems integration experts who understands all these with a strong play in a variety of Integrations products, Genysoft is to consider for all your needs of middleware.

We are integration experts from Offshore Hyderabad, India and have been working with large scale integration projects since 2008. We have vast experience working on multiple middleware integration products, which is a very unique combination of skills that we proud of. Be it is On-premise or Cloud, Proprietary or Open source, Frameworks or Integration Suites we have expertise.

Our integration engineers have experience in various integration products such as Oracle SOA, WSO2, Mulesoft and we are active contributors to the community where we learn and share the experiences. We recognize that each customer integration project is unique and we understand your integration puzzles and we apply our expertise to solve them. Our delivery methodology ensures scalable, cost effective integration solutions to your problems.

We’ve gathered our knowledge over decade; a knowledge that we are happy to now place at your service. Please Write to Us your needs of middleware.