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"This further solidifies the ESB product category as a force in the industry with significant staying power," commented Web Services Journal editorial board member and Enterprise Services Bus pioneer David A. Chappell (pictured), as IBM yesterday announced its new "WebSphere ESB" product.

Chappell, vice president and chief technology evangelist for Sonic Software, the company perhaps most closely associated with popularizing the term "Enterprise Service Bus," continued:

"As the inventors and leading providers of ESB technology, Sonic has for several years taken a hard stance that ESB is a product category, and not just an abstract pattern."

"IBM started an industry debate of pattern vs product a couple of years ago as a way of laying down a smokescreen while keeping customers locked into the Sargasso sea of technology under the WebSphere brand."

"It is good to see that IBM has finally come around and recognized the shift in IT thinking that ESB is indeed a product category," Chappell added, "much like the appserver category that developed in the late 90s. This further solidifies the ESB product category as a force in the industry with significant staying power."

Since introducing its first ESB product in March of 2002, Sonic Software has lead the charge in creating the product category, Chappell said. He concluded:

"We have been defining its shape, and educating the industry with definitive works such as the OReilly “Enterprise Service Bus” book. As the ideal platform upon which to build a SOA, Sonic ESB and Sonic SOA Infrastructure Suite also provides many capabilities above and beyond the core definition of an ESB, such as business process orchestration, relational database service, XML server, and our SOA Workbench."

"We continue to drive innovation in the SOA infrastructure technology space will continue to compete very strongly and successfully against IBM and other smaller contenders through unique enterprise capabilities such as our Continuous Availability Architecture, which protects an enterprise from failures and disruptions in service without the need for specialized hardware."

Click on the image to view video.

(February 17, 2005, 7:14 AM) - Dave Chappell of Sonic Software stops by the SYS-CON.TV stand minutes before he delivered his session on SOA at Web Services Edge 2005 East in Boston earlier this year.