The Enterprise Service Bus as an Evolutionary Advantage for Company Growth

A company's growth is accompanied by the growth of 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 within, transmits it, stores it, reproduces it, and so on — much the same as what our neurons and brain do.

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.

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.

A WMS is added to manage stock balances, then an ERP to plan production business processes, then a PIM to manage product information…

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.

An ESB bus combines a set of functions that, in a "star" topology, are scattered across integrations or not implemented at all. ESB gathers information from other systems, both those belonging to the company's IT infrastructure and external ones.

Information arrives in the same form and formats in which it is held in the source system.

Inside the ESB, data is transformed into the formats required for delivery to other systems.

The operator defines the logic of routes and conversions: where given data should be obtained from, how it should be transformed, and where it should be sent.

Logs are stored in the message broker. If errors or data losses occur, it is easy to pinpoint when something went wrong without waiting for the error to recur. Accordingly, fixing errors and recovering data becomes far easier and faster.

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?

This doesn't require writing dozens or hundreds of point-to-point integrations — you just define the integration between the ESB and the marketplace and configure the data routes inside the enterprise service bus. Even someone with no development background can handle the latter: the ESB interface is clear and easy to use, and the whole setup takes only a few hours.

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