Informatica

Service Mediation
The Role of an Enterprise Service Bus
in an SOA

2

S E R E R v i c E M E d i ATAT i O n

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 The Road To Web SeRviceS and eSbS ................................. 4
2 enTeRpRiSe-claSS RequiRemenTS
foR an eSb ................................................................................. 5
3 addiTional evaluaTion cRiTeRia........................................ 7
4 The Tibco eSb foR Soa ...........................................................7
5 aSynchRonouS invocaTion
enhanceS Soa flexibiliTy ..................................................... 8
6 mulTipRoTocol SuppoRT
STReamlineS communicaTionS ..........................................9
7 SeRvice mediaTion viRTualizeS SySTemS ........................... 9
8 complex RouTingand TRanSfoRmaTion
opTimizeS buSineSS pRoceSSeS ............................................ 9
9 ScalabiliTy and high availabiliTy ................................... 10
10 pRoceSS oRcheSTRaTion ..................................................... 10
11 Tibco STReamlineS
a SeRvice-oRienTed appRoach .......................................... 11
12 abouT Tibco........................................................................... 11

3

S E R E R v i c E M E d i ATAT i O n

Executive Summary Business agility—the ability to quickly adapt to changing
needs—is increasingly becoming a key goal for businesses operating in the
highly competitive global marketplace. Business managers need rapid resource
and process reconfiguration to effect such change. To facilitate thischange, IT
managers are moving away from siloed processes and large monolithic enterprise
software; they are examining ways to loosely couple applications together and
provide business functions that can be turned into services and reused across the
enterprise.
A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a way of building an enterprise IT
infrastructure out of loosely coupled components known as“services” that
perform discrete functions. Composite applications are a key element of an SOA
environment. These applications are created by invoking and orchestrating multiple
services, events and models in such a way that they collectively perform a higherorder business function. This functionality increases business agility by enabling
IT departments to reuse components that have already beentested in production
and have known scalability and quality-of-service characteristics. Such reuse can
help reduce time to market and lower IT development costs.
An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a distributed, message-based integration
solution based on open standards. The role of an ESB is to facilitate reliable
communications between IT resources such as applications, platforms andservices that are distributed in multiple systems throughout an enterprise. As IT
departments increasingly focus on designing SOAs to lower development costs
and increase business agility, ESBs are a key first step in setting up an enterprise
SOA. ESBs form the foundation of the SOA and can be complemented by
additional productivity capabilities such as service orchestration and registries.
Thispaper discusses the requirements for an ESB that can address the needs of an
enterprise-ready SOA.

4

S E R E R v i c E M E d i ATAT i O n

Trend: Web services

1. The Road to Web Services and ESBs

adoption standardizes SOA
messaging

Soap, Web Services description language (WSdl) and hTTp have solved a
thorny issue that plagued previous attempts to create standards for distributeda key challenge for

systems such as common object Request broker architecture (coRba) or the

developers has been

distributed computing environment (dce)—namely, widespread acceptance from

integrating multiple systems

the two largest application technology camps (.neT and J2ee) as well as from a

that use different languages

number of application vendors. While this is...