In a sign of how quickly things change, the "traditional" enterprise service bus (ESB) is undergoing an evolution to stay current with the demands of the service-oriented architecture, morphing from an integration/messaging tool to an infrastructure offering that includes tools for business process management (BPM) and governance, analysts say.

The introduction this week of webMethods Fabric 7.0 indicates how much the ESB product category has grown from its original integration backbone role.

"The thing that we see in webMethods Fabric 7.0 is a really straightforward development environment for building composite applications in an SOA fashion," said Bill Swanton, vice president of research for AMR Research, Inc. He said the new product integrates all the tools historically linked to integration including the original enterprise application integration (EAI) technology as well as ESB, but now includes BPM, business activity monitoring (BAM), registry/repository and governance capabilities.