Tight Budgets? Try Open-Source SOA!

By Mike Kavis, CIO, 07/31/08

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Implementing SOA can be an extremely expensive undertaking. You might need to purchase several products within the SOA stack like an enterprise service bus (ESB), a business process modeling (BPM) tool, a portal, a rules engine and a data services tool. But it doesn't stop there. There are additional tools for testing, SOA governance, security... and the list goes on and on. In addition to all the software, you need to budget for training, hardware, consulting and salaries.

That's a boat load of capital you need to ask senior management for. Leveraging open source products and services can help ease the pain.

There are many advantages of leveraging open source to meet your SOA needs.

There are a few paths that you can take for your open-source SOA initiative. You can go with a complete open-source SOA stack, you can mix and match various open-source SOA products from different vendors, or you can mix and match both commercial and open-source products.

There are two major open source stack providers that stand out: MuleSource and WSO2.

Mulesource

MuleSource launched the Mule ESB back in 2003. In 2006, they formed an actual company and continued enhancing their product offerings. In addition to the ESB, they have an application and services monitoring tool called MuleHQ, and a design-time governance tool (just released) called MuleGalaxy.

To complete their stack offering, MuleSource works with open-source partners Liferay for portal functionality and Intalio for BPM functionality. Do you need proof that Mulesource is ready for prime time? Just ask H&R Block, which has a 130,000 server Mule ESB implementation [PDF] or read about Walmart.com [PDF].

WSO2

WSO2 is a true open-source alternative. Unlike many open-source vendors in this space, they do not have a separate commercial and enterprise offering. All of their features are free, with the hope that their customers will acknowledge the need to purchase subscription services. This is a great strategy because it allows the customers to see the full value of the products without having to deal with the limitations of a community version. WSO2 is three years old and started with a Web Services Framework, which is a communication run time that they offer for Perl, PHP, Ruby, Spring, C and C++.

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