2006 continued to be the year of the ESB in terms of new entrants and new products. However, the core problem with the category has not been resolved and in fact have got worse: Although every vendor seems to have one, nobody can agree on precisely what one is.

Throughout my tenure at PolarLake, I believed that (a) there was a need for complex integration middleware to implement an SOA – a view which now has become generally accepted (it certainly wasn’t the case back in 2001 when we started!), and (b) the Enterprise Service Bus would be the title used for the complete stack of middleware required. It appears the industry is speaking or at least mumbling with different voices on this one.