Can an eight year old product category, which is hotly contested by every middleware vendor, deliver unique and differentiating product offerings?   When performing an ESB comparison, you will notice almost all Enterprise Service Bus products support enterprise integration patterns, deliver all required ESB features (i.e. web services, message transformation, protocol mediation, content routing), and offer a graphical development workbench.   When technical evaluations focus on core performance and quality of service (i.e .reliability, availability, and scalability), proof of concept workloads must closely mirror expected production profiles and the evaluation effort ideally includes vendor participation.

A team comparing ESB offerings may choose to create a comprehensive ESB evaluation framework, and delineate required and optional features.  To further distinguish vendor offerings and separate exceptional from commodity, your ESB comparison process may review strategic platform fit and architecture.   Table 1 below compares open source ESB offerings and a leading proprietary vendor across SOA platform fit and ESB architecture attributes.