While the concept of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) still has many scratching their heads, the ESB market is starting to bloom early this spring, in accordance with analysts' predictions.

Sonic Software Corp. and Iona Technologies both unveiled new enhancements to their ESB products this month. The announcements coincide with predictions that Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. is making about the ESB market picking up in 2005.

On Monday, Iona unveiled Version 3.0 of its Artix ESB platform. The Dublin, Ireland-based vendor's latest release includes enhanced support for integrated development environments such as Eclipse and Visual Studio. It also improves its integration with mainframes using Web Services Description Language-centric development and generation techniques.

Earlier this month, Bedford, Mass.-based Sonic Software Corp. unveiled two new additions to its ESB: the Sonic Collaboration Server and the Sonic Database Service.