Service Bus as an Evolutionary Advantage for Company's Development

Practicing managers often compare a company to a living organism. If we develop this idea, then the IT infrastructure can be considered the nervous system in this "organism". It receives information from external and internal sources, transmits it, stores it, reproduces it, etc. that is very close to what our neurons and brain do.

But there is one thing you should remember. Whereas a company's development can be compared to the life cycle of a living creature (birth, survival, growth, death), the development of an IT ecosystem is rather an evolutionary process. It grows and becomes more complex, takes on more and more functions and processes, and changes.

Let's consider a simple and clear example – an online store. At the beginning, its IT infrastructure is quite simple, consisting of two or three elements with the relevant integrations between them. CRM for customer service provision and order processing, an online store on Bitrix and integration with Amazon marketplace.

As the business grows, the number of elements in its ecosystem multiplies. First, they add a WMS program for easy stock control, then – ERP for planning the manufacturing workflow, PIM for product information management... The number of integrations is growing exponentially.

Integrations of this type are called star integrations (for the multi-beam structure) or spaghetti integrations (as the integrations are all muddled up), and they would be useful if a company does not plan significant expansion and growth or the IT transformation. However, it is worth remembering that the star has certain features that can have negative impact on the growth of IT infrastructure.

Evolution has already proved the right track to remain competitive by developing the central nervous system.

In the IT infrastructure, the role of the central nervous system is performed by the ESB (stands for "enterprise service bus") layer. After the ESB integration, the IT infrastructure layout becomes much more efficient and transparent.

Current techno-economic paradigm dictates its own rules. The company's success is closely tied to its ability to promptly react, transform, and scale up. In this respect, the horizontal integration with ESB provides a clear evolutionary advantage to the company.

Need to connect to a new marketplace? There is no need to write dozens and hundreds of point-to-point integrations, you only write the integrations between the ESB and the marketplace and configure data routes inside the enterprise service bus. The latter can be manageable even by someone who is not a professional developer: the ESB interface is clear and easy to use, the entire setup will only take a few hours.

A CRM system update has been released? Again, you don't have to rewrite all the integrations.

integration of the ESB bus is the most logical solution allowing you to reduce development and maintenance costs in the future and, as a result, improve your work efficiency.

Horizontal integration using a service bus has its disadvantages. ESB is a separate system that requires additional resources: dedicated servers, primary integration costs. Nevertheless, in the long run, if the company wants to scale and and evolve, these expenses will pay off.

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