From Just Services to an Enterprise Bus

Market dynamics today causes the landscape of any enterprise to be very dynamic. Even in an organization located physically in a single location with a single data center, this co-location may not remain so for long given the immense M&A activity underway in businesses today. New companies would be acquired, and existing companies merged to create new entities. This results in very fluid organizations. The services infrastructure should be in a position to adapt to this fluidity. The peer-to-peer (P2P) integration solutions such as simple Web Services are probably best suited for organizations with not too many systems talking to each other with low volume of services traffic, in a single or just few locations. The moment that these assumptions are no longer valid, peer-to-peer (P2P) services infrastructure such as Web Services or EAI may not suffice. They are likely to face these constraints:

• It will be difficult to assure reliability across WANs, as network performance may be unpredictable.

• RPCs, being synchronous in nature, may face failures/timeout issues servicing service requests due to high latencies.

• In simple point to point connectivity, each request gets its own connection from the origin system to the provider system, which could result in a large number of connections in high services traffic environments.

• Scalability and reliability could come under stress.