Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as an evolutionary advantage for company growth

30.12.2020 Company growth is accompanied by growth in its IT infrastructure.

An ESB (enterprise service bus) lets you add new capabilities faster, save time and money on integrations, and depend less on developers.

Management practitioners often compare a company to a living organism.

If we extend this analogy, the role of the nervous system in the company's "organism" is filled by the IT infrastructure.

It receives information from outside or inside, transmits it, stores it, reproduces it, and so on - our neurons and brain do roughly the same. But there is a nuance.

While a company is often discussed in terms of the life cycle of a single living being (birth, survival, growth, death), the development of an IT ecosystem more closely resembles an evolutionary path.

It grows and becomes more complex, takes on more and more functions and processes, and transforms.

Let's take a simple, clear example: an online store.

At the start, its IT infrastructure is simple, made up of two or three elements with the corresponding integrations between them: a CRM for handling customers and orders, an online store on Bitrix, and an integration with the OZON marketplace.

As a company grows, the number of elements in its ecosystem increases.

Then a WMS is added to manage warehouse stock, then ERP for production business process planning, PIM for product information management...

The number of integrations grows exponentially.

Integrations of this type are called a "star" (for their multi-rayed structure) or "spaghetti" (for their tangle), and they are fine if a company has no plans for large-scale growth and IT transformation.

However, keep in mind that the "star" has a number of traits that can become critical for the growth of an information infrastructure.

Upgrading any single element inevitably forces a large-scale reworking of integrations. For example, a Bitrix update is released, and every integration tied to it has to be reworked.

Event logging is implemented differently in each integration (if it is implemented at all).

If data is lost or arrives in an incorrect form, tracking down when and why the error occurred is extremely difficult.

Each new element of the system requires significant investment in point-to-point integration.

You decide to sell through one more marketplace, and you have to integrate it with the online store, CRM, WMS, ERP, PIM, and so on.

Business analytics suffers: data is scattered across different sources, stored in different formats, and duplicated.

Bringing them together into a convenient tool for management decision-making is very hard.

The larger the infrastructure grows, the more time and money it demands for upkeep and the fewer resources remain to improve how it works.

The economics of the technological order set their own rules.

A company's success is tightly bound to its ability to react quickly, transform, and scale. In this sense, horizontal integration with an ESB undoubtedly becomes an evolutionary advantage for the company.

Need to connect to a new marketplace?

There is no need to write dozens or hundreds of point-to-point integrations. It is enough to set up integrations between the ESB and the marketplace and configure data routes inside the enterprise service bus. Even someone without a development background can handle the latter: the ESB interface is clear and easy to use, and the entire setup takes only a few hours. Has a CRM update been released?

Again, there is no need to rewrite all the integrations.