The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming a reality in the modern workplace. Everything within our communities, personal lives, and workforce is becoming connected to the internet. When your phone works as a credit card, parking meter talks to your computer, and home thermostat programs itself, how can you match enterprise data to consumer demand? The world expects all of your data to be available at any location, at any time, and on any device—this includes your workforce and your customers.
A Different World
In the 20th century, an SOA strategy was sufficient if it was only an EAI strategy. Servers could talk to other servers and the speed of business was dramatically slower. Many applications and business processes could survive in batch process mode. This is no longer possible in the Internet of Things world.
An enterprise service bus used to be adequately described as a messaging layer combined with a transformation layer—this is the traditional definition espoused by many analysts and consultants. This definition is no longer accurate for the speed of business in the 21st-century. The two components must now be combined with a complex-event processing capability. The speed of modern business can no longer afford to wait for database-driven applications to give responses to requests. Now, an environment where the infrastructure itself can immediately respond to stimuli is required in a modern enterprise.
Scale to the Environment
In the Internet of Things, your sensors now need to be all-encompassing. They will give you feedback at thousands or millions of times a second. Your database-driven applications simply won’t be able to scale to handle this deluge. The Internet of Things requires an enterprise service bus that can make decisions and respond to the complex behaviors of your environment. Today’s business demands the ESB become ESB+ by adding a complex event processing capability.
Read more on integrating different enterprise-class systems.
