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Home > SOA News > Sun unveils new SOA platform, ESB |
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Sun Microsystems Inc. officially entered the enterprise service bus (ESB) market today, rolling out its first upgrade of the former SeeBeyond Inc. messaging middleware and tying it together with Sun's portal, application server, Web server and development studio offerings as part of a single platform.
The platform, called the Composite Application Platform, will be available at the end of March for a free download with a $100 per employee per year subscription price for those companies that wish to add services and support. SeeBeyond, purchased by Sun last June, had it's roots as an enterprise application integration vendor, but Sun believes the middleware has evolved to embody the loosely coupled ethos of service oriented architecture. "We scale, we integrate with all the technologies out there, we support all the Web services standards, this is a full-fledged ESB," said Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for SOA and integration platforms at Sun. He added that the SeeBeyond product, now called the Sun Java ESB Suite, offers Java Messaging Service-based distributed agents that can operate with no communications hub required. Business process management, workflow and data transformation are also part of the ESB suite. Sun has already launched what it calls the Open ESB community. That group so far has concentrated on working with the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification, but Keller noted that the Business Process Execution Language engine will be the first component of the Java ESB Suite to submit its code to Open ESB, probably around the time of the JavaOne conference in May. Oddly, the ESB does not yet support JBI, but Keller promised interoperability would be added later this year. While it may be popular among vendors to offer an ESB, it has become a sloppy term in industry parlance of late. "It depends on what you define as an ESB," said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Sterling, Va.-based Current Analysis Inc. "Everyone's just kind of putting the ESB label on everything these days." He noted that Sun's pricing has given the SeeBeyond product a chance to gain traction outside the "high-end" niche it used to target. "Tibco, SeeBeyond and other EAI vendors charged a lot for their products and that was a barrier to entry for a lot of would-be customers," he said. Keller noted that Sun's Java Enterprise System, of which the Composite Application Platform will be a component, has gained 150 new or expanded customers over the past six months. Willett believes the free downloads and "attractive" subscription price will cause a lot of IT shops to give Sun a look as a potential fit for their software infrastructure. Yet Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, warned against reading too much into the new product designation. "SOA is not just a market thing," he cautioned. "And it's not interfaces that you need to change. If it was that easy then we'd have all done it 10 years ago. It's a complete change in the way you deliver services. We no longer think about building monolithic applications and integrating them. We think about building services and composing them."
He said that while Sun has made some minor upgrades to the SeeBeyond offering and combined it with various Sun offerings, "it's basically the same old stuff." He looked to Sun's open source communities as a potential way to shake it loose from its current integration and Java moorings. "They need to embrace service-oriented architecture as something that's fundamentally different from Java," Schmelzer said. "That may be the hardest thing for them to do." He noted that SOA is not object-oriented like Java and does not rely on portable code. "Sun gets into a bind when they combine the two," he said. Willett hoped to see Sun expand its business process tool beyond the ESB suite and into its entire software line. He added that a SOA management functionality would be a welcome addition to the Composite Application Platform.
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