ESB-Oriented Architecture: The Wrong Approach to Adopting SOA

An increasingly common request from clients is to complete a project that does not use SOA as a whole, but instead implements only an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture. Such an ESB-oriented architecture is easy to envision, but its success is difficult to measure. What clients requesting such projects don't understand is this: An ESB-oriented architecture doesn't produce business value. A project based on ESB-oriented architecture needs to be made into one based on SOA to help ensure that it successfully delivers business value.