Enterprise service bus (ESB) intermediation remains an issue despite the adoption of WS-* standards, argues John Michelsen, chief architect at iTKO Inc., the testing vendor specializing in service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"There's a whole space emerging among enterprise architects called ESB intermediation," he said. "They're finding that two or three different divisions of their company are using different ESBs from different vendors. Yet they're trying to build business processes across these ESBs. But the ESBs are designed to be their own center of the universe. How do you intermediate transactions across these ESBs?"

This leaves enterprise architects facing the problem of how to integrate the integration platform, said the architect for iTKO, which seeks to maintain a Switzerland-like neutrality and support testing for all the vendors in the SOA marketplace.