Finally, IBM Made a Smart Decision on Its Integration Product

A couple of months ago during IBM IMPACT conference 2014, IBM announced Integration Bus (IIB) v9 (formerly been known as WebSphere Message Broke) as one of IBM’s flagship integration products. As the same time, IBM asks its WESB (WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus) users to migrate to IIB.  As an IBM technology solution professional, I have been working with a couple of IBM products including IIB and WESB. For long time, I was the person betting that WESB would not have much market. A few reasons made me believe so:

• IIB or message broker has been on market for long time, it has been adopted by customers world widely. The introduction of WESB is very late.
• WESB caused confusion about IBM integration product stack. As a result, it hurt IBM sales of IBM integration products (to my believe).
• WESB is not as easy to use and not as flexible & versatile as IIB.
• If people would use WESB, why not open source Mule which is very similar to WESB in terms of platform. How did you justify spending much more for WESB instead of using the similar product Mule which is a lot cheaper?

When I was with IBM as IBM consultant, I had never recommended clients to use or shift to WESB because the reasons given above. I never believed that WESB could take off substantially. Now, what IBM announce was incidental to what my thoughts was. Too bad to those IBM customers who purchased WESB and spent tons of money for it. It might be a lesson for those people who made this decision! (the lesson is: the decision maker must be a technology savvy as well. Otherwise, how can he/she makes a right decision about what technology should be adopted?)