The ESB is said to usher in a new paradigm in data integration, offering web services standards-based integration that is more efficient, elegant, robust, scalable and manageable than the previous generation of integration brokers or enterprise application integration, EAI.
On Tuesday ComputerWire broke the news that Tibco’s Ranadive rejects Sonic Software’s long-held assertion that it invented the ESB, saying that claim is a complete joke. Ranadive said: I personally invented it. We’ve always called ourselves ‘The Information Bus Company’, and the ESB is no different.
But speaking to ComputerWire yesterday, Sonic Software president Greg O’Connor hit back, saying: We shipped the first ever ESB in February 2002, and it was our engineering team who invented the ESB and worked on it for 18 months before we shipped that first ESB in 2002.
Sonic Software has for many years described itself as, The inventor and leading provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB). O’Connor said Sonic’s claim to having invented the ESB would be backed up by Gartner integration analyst Roy Schulte, who according to O’Connor, First heard the term ESB from Sonic. Schulte could not be contacted to comment directly by the time we went to press.
O’Connor also rejected Ranadive’s comment on Tuesday that, A big chunk of our revenue is from selling ESBs. It isn’t for Sonic. According to O’Connor over half of Sonic’s revenue now comes from selling ESBs, the remainder made up of message broker sales.
O’Connor said that Sonic has almost 1,000 customers worldwide, and unlike Tibco, our license revenue is actually growing. For the three months ended May 31 Sonic Software saw revenues of $6.2m, up slightly year on year. Tibco’s license sales were indeed down by almost 8% to $41.8m, though the company saw total sales up 25% year on year.
According to O’Connor, Considering that Tibco bought a $130m business [its Staffware acquisition of April 2004] last year, it’s not surprising they grew total sales. But given that their license sales were down despite that acquisition, it’s clear they are no longer recognized as a leader in this market.
In defense of Tibco’s most recent quarter, however, Ranadive said that a few large deals had slipped into the subsequent quarter, and that some deals were taking longer to be finalized. We have over 2,000 customers, and 1,400 employees. We have seven development centers. We are profitable and generate cash. Last quarter we generated $35m to $40m in cash, opined Ranadive.
O’Connor argued that Tibco’s reduced license sales in its latest quarter is evidence that, Customers can now tell the difference between legacy EAI like Tibco’s hub and spoke, and the new generation of ESBs and service oriented architecture. O’Connor said that the only reason Sonic Software had not trademarked the term enterprise service bus or ESB was because it wanted to see the category as a whole take off, floating all genuine ESB boats.
The older guys don’t like the fact we’re faster, more scalable, and have higher availability, said O’Connor.
Tibco’s Ranadive argues that Sonic has made fictitious claims, and that nine out of the top 10 banks use Tibco’s ESB, while Sonic’s ESB is unproven. Sonic points to customers like the British Airports Authority and many others that have strategically based their integration plans on its ESB as evidence to the contrary.
With IBM recently starting to use the term ESB in its own marketing literature, and a whole raft of companies including Cape Clear, PolarLake, Fiorano Software, SeeBeyond, BEA and webMethods now banging the ESB drum, competition in the space is only going to get stiffer as the technology matures.
