IBM Integration Bus (IIB): Why is it better than an open source alternative?

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has traditionally been viewed as a corporate integration and messaging structure that serves as a foundation for application architecture. But in recent years, this perception has changed to fit the needs of today’s merging IT landscape where integration with cloud and mobile applications has become increasingly significant.

The significance of ESB from an organizational point of view

As a software architecture for middleware offering essential services for more complex architectures, ESB promotes flexibility in communication between applications. It can be used to create and enable communication between software applications that interact within a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

ESB plays a significant role within an organization’s application architecture. Therefore, when considering a new ESB implementation, organizations must take into consideration both functional requirements such as orchestration, message routing and data transformation as well as non-functional requirements. Unfortunately, businesses tend to focus only on areas such as ease of use, reliability, and availability. They must also consider important parameters such as high availability.

An ESB interacts with multiple cross-format applications, and this can affect availability. Businesses must consider a robust ESB solution that can ensure high availability and uptime. They can choose from commercial software as well as a range of open source offerings. While both these categories have their pros and cons, industry leading software such as IBM Integration Bus (IIB) offer greater advantages.

Enable universal connectivity and transformation with IIB

IBM Integration Bus (IIB) Advanced, formerly known as WebSphere Message Broker, provides connectivity and universal data transformation for both SOA and non-SOA environments. This has several advantages for businesses, including the ability to get rid of point-to-point connections and batch processing irrespective of data format, platform or protocol.

IBM Integration Bus Advanced offers businesses unmatched advantages:

  • Utilize robust capabilities to address diverse integration requirements for meeting the needs of any size project
  • Help the entire organization make smarter business decisions by providing rapid access, visibility and control over data as it flows through business applications and systems
  • Connect throughout an array of heterogeneous applications and web services, removing the need for complex point-to-point connectivity
  • Provide extensive support for Microsoft applications and services to make the most of existing Microsoft .NET skills and software investment
  • Deliver a standardized, simplified and flexible integration foundation to help you quickly and easily support business needs and scale with business growth

Forrester Research: The benefits of IIB over open source offerings

According to a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study by Forrester, a set of evaluation criteria were employed to arrive at a comprehensive understanding based on development, operational and financial parameters. Forrester conducted the survey with an existing customer with years of experience with IBM WebSphere Message Broker (earlier version of IBM Integration Bus).

The survey identified the following benefits of using IIB:

  • Reduced support incidents with increased reliability
  • Improved team efficiency with increased development and testing efficiency
  • Reduced hardware requirements by significantly increased throughput
  • Reduced integration requirement due to more inclusive integration options

The study also proved that IIB offered the following advantages:

  • Gain of up to 85% higher throughput with IIB
  • Significantly greater scalability
  • Reduced business risk of failure and downtime
  • Significantly less testing effort and time

To find out more, contact Royal Cyber for a complimentary consultation.

Leave a Reply