Enkay has built integration solutions using the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) pattern. The ESB provides a hosting platform for service oriented architecture (SOA). SOA helps reduce the number of integrations that need to be implemented and maintained. For example, if there are ten systems that need to be connected, with simple point to point integrations (P2P), we will need to develop 45 integrations, while using SOA we will need just 10 integrations. So as the number of integrations increase over time, the cost per integration can increase significantly when using P2P integrations, while SOA increases the value of your services as you connect more nodes and reduces costs per integration. In addition, an ESB helps you implement enterprise integration patterns, centralized exception handling (ESB Portal) for error handling, reporting, and recovery, business activity monitoring (BAM Portal) for business process tracking, administrative console for operational monitoring, rules engine (BRE) that allows frequently changing business rules to be externalized so that code redeployment is minimized. The ESB also provides adapters for connecting to different systems (Microsoft and several non-Microsoft products), and accelerators for speeding up deployment of solutions (e.g. HIPAA, SWIFT). ESB infrastructure provides an architectural foundation for building highly scalable (scale in and scale out) and available solution.

Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 R2 along with the ESB Toolkit 2.3, Enkay has been able to architect and build ESBs that overcome limitations of traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions. When different line-of-business (LOB) systems that are distinct and different need to be connected, the ESB pattern has proven over time to be better at connecting applications in a loosely-coupled way, leading to greater business agility.

Traditional point to point services can quickly become difficult to scale and manage, since each node is directly connected to another node, and sometimes leads to redundant functionality. It is also difficult to gain visibility into the system with directly connected point to point services, and there is no easy way to provide monitoring.

An ESB allows services to be shared more easily, and is a significantly better design approach than traditional point to point services. In addition ESB provides a core set of features that can be leveraged to provide common capabilities instead of developing these individually. For example, ESB supports message publish/subscribe, transformation, BAM portal, ESB portal, exception handling, fault tolerance (unreliable end systems), high availability, message recovery, message replay, automatic retry, guaranteed delivery, transactional consistency, tracking, business rules engine, monitoring, alerting, code reuse, service reuse, security, o-ramps, off=ramps, adapters, and accelerators. If a service needs to change, the application does not need to be aware of the change since the ESB can modify the configuration without having to change the application.

Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about EBS and how it can help you reduce your costs and increase ROI.