What next for EAI/ESB product vendors???

With JBI being widely aacepted by the industry, there is little these vendors, who had been surviving till date providing proprietary stacks, can do other than jumping onto it.

With the loose-coupling and plugability provided by the JBI framework, there are two areas where the vendors can invest in..

- Building a good JBI Container (Meta Container)
- JBI components (Service Engines, Binding Components)

Think of you buying a JBI container from Company A , buy a set of JBI components(ex. Rule Engine, Orchestration Engine) from Company B and buy some other JBI components (ex. FTP, AS2, JMS connectors, are called binding components.. ) from Company C and create the ESB for yourself and put the stepping stones for an SOA Enterprise.

Also the JBI container would provide with management and monitoring interfaces, and can be monitored by any JMX based Monitoring Tool/Interface. Customer would have the flexibility of having the best of breed JBI components and Containers available.

So, the next question is, if we can choose and plug JBI components, do we then prefer buying them when there are quite a few good ones available in the open source.

With open-source projects like servicemix catching the eye of many organizations, there is an interesting duel between these vendors and the open source community in the offing.

Now that the product vendors have very little role to play, organizations should think of creating their ESBs themselves or involve some system integrators who would create product agnostic solutions. Rather than thinking of how best to use the product architecture and work-arounds for feature defficiencies, there would be more emphasis on the solution architecture.

Ofcourse, there can be arguments that JBI is Java specific and there are many critics of Java, who would go any distance to show how java sucks, but, I feel this is a very good stepping stone in the direction of standardization of integration/SOA space. I can visualize Microsoft with its own set of frameworks and competing specifaications/technolgies playing its own game.

AFAIK microsoft is now obsessed with DSL...........................................................