IS to become an Enterprise Service Bus

[system]

Your statement about business environments:

5. IS at its core is a centralized ESB type. That has cons - most real business requirments are simple and do not require various set of IS-ESB capabilities. If one does not need simultaneous protocol support, integration adapters have been already implemented somewhere else, and in Flow is also implemented somewhere else - what is the value of IS? In this case a light-weight distributed ESB would do a better job. Axis2 with corresponding WS-* implementations would be a good alternative, right? Why should one use a swiss army knife for all his needs? Isn’t it the case that in reality we use a different knife to cut bread, another for meat, and etc.?

I have to disagree with as well. I currently work for a fortune 250 company and have worked for several others. My experience suggest business integration needs are rarely if ever simple. In fact they are most often very complex and involve a lot of legacy systems. This is the suite spot for webMethods.

If your Integration needs are truly simple then the webMethods product lines are probably too much for you. Consider any of the numerous open-source ESB’s to do message routing, simple (And I do mean simple) transformation, multi-protocol conversion (as long as it is JMS and HTTP) and Web Services hosting. If you have real Integration needs (Complex Transformations, Data Enrichment, Complex Decision Logic, Legacy Adapter Support, and Orchestration) then webMethods is a more serious consideration for you.

As I pointed out, there are some con’s to using the IS server as the core to the ESB but the positives far outweigh the negatives when serious integration work is to be done.

Axis2 is not an ESB.