IBM's ESB Plans Emerge.

In fiscal 2004-2005, IBM will introduce a series of products that will solidify its enterprise service bus (ESB) strategy. The technologies will closely integrate the company's messaging protocols with its high-level integration tools to form a single infrastructure. This convergence is an attempt to reconcile into a single infrastructure all the low-level messaging protocols, such as Java Message Service (JMS), MQ, Internet Inter-Object Request Broker Protocol. Another step is to converge key application integration tools such as message transformation and business process management into what they refer to as WebSphere Business Integration version 6.0. This notion of an ESB connecting to a service-oriented architecture is very important because there is a plethora of standards and protocols that would be part of a real enterprise messaging system. IBM has been shipping products that developers use to build their own ESB, such as WebSphere Business Integration Broker, Event Broker, the Interchange Server it acquired from CrossWorlds, and Business Integration Workbench. The company has also integrated a number of messaging technologies into WebSphere such as JMS, and support for SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL.