Review of ESB suites

Network Computing have published their full comparative review of ESB software from a number of different vendors. You may remember that one of the product reviews they ran earlier in the series was for WebSphere Message Broker, which I responded to in a blog post.

Message Broker scores C+, which in my opinion is surprising. I find it remarkable that the product scored relatively low on routing, transformation, and protocol support - especially when the earlier review was pretty positive in these areas. It was marked down on orchestration, which is not so surprising since WebSphere Process Server is the BPEL engine that provides that kind of support. As one of my colleagues has pointed out, the author of the review admits elsewhere that the question of whether an ESB should support BPEL is somewhat contentious, so it is remarkable that orchestration is the single largest weighted factor in the comparison.

It is a shame that there is no score for performance, as my gut feeling is that Message Broker would probably have scored 6 out of 5 on that measure :-)

The other interesting article published a short while ago is Network Computing's market analysis of the ESB.

Update: a colleague just pointed out that the comparison doesn't include MS Biztalk, which is slightly disappointing.

Technorati tags: IBM WebSphere ESB BPEL message broker