Key Visual - Manage Your Business Integration

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

The central function of an ESB is the exchange of data between IT systems or their components. The data exchange proceeds in form of services requests. The implementation of these services however is not determined, but several strategies are to be used in practise. This is normally realised by the underlying layer, the transportation layer.

The main functions of an ESB are:

Routing
Protocol conversion
Data transformation (Mapping)
Connectivity
Monitoring, logging, and management

Furthermore, an ESB can provide central services like:

Transaction Management
Security functionality
Quality of Service, SLAs
Service-Registry and meta data management
Single-Sign-On support
Solution of conflicts of versions
Service - orchestration and -aggregation, process management
Expandability of service messages (semantic mapping)
Service life cycle support

The ESB is the communication infrastructure for applications and processes

An ESB can exist in the following structural alternatives:

central server (hub-and-spoke approach)
federal system, i.e. as connection of several peripheral coupled systems
fully peripheral implementation

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