Sunday, September 17, 2006

Microsoft ESB

Microsoft in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) space? Ot should be an interesting development to watch, especially for shops who are heavily tied to Tibco RV and EMS. Microsoft will have to really exceed Tibco EMS's performance in order for people to take notice. Also, Microsoft will have to throw the EMS people a bone and support JMS. I might suggest that Microsoft come out with patterns to support synchronous calls over JMS easily.

I can imagine some interesting tie-ins with SQL Server and Excel. You could have database events published on the message bus. You can also have Excel subscribing to the message bus in order to receive real-time stock quotes and position updates, and you can also have Excel publishing risk calculations back out to the bus. If Microsoft were to have this trio (DB, Excel, bus) tied in seamlessly, then this would show Wall Street a real committment.

Are you an RV, EMS, or Sonic shop? What would it take for you to transition to a Microsoft ESB?

By the way .... A few weeks ago, I asked a Microsoft rep about what they are looking at for messaging, and they said that they will be supporting WS-Events. Is this an alternative to JMS for async messaging? What we don't need is to divide the messaging community at this point.


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

"You can also have Excel subscribing to the message bus in order to receive real-time stock quotes and position updates, and you can also have Excel publishing risk calculations back out to the bus."

*sigh*

ESBs will be useful for Market Data distribution right after they have efficient streaming video distribution - i.e. dont hold your breath.

People continue to try and 'square the circle' by using databases, spreadhseets, and ESBs for real-time market data since these things existed. These are not real-time and wont scale and dont have the DRM controls that are mandated by the Exchanges and Vendors.

In most cases real-time market data rates exceed video yet few people would consider using a database or ESB to store that. Why market data?

Yes you can extend your single user Workstation to feed Excel or whatever but the days of human trading are entering their twilight hours and you cant fit market data for a wide market scope into non-market data transports/containers.

As long as there is competitive advantage in getting market data quicker and with wider breadth and greater depth you will always be doing a diservice to your customers (or project sponsors) by abusing general purpose technology.

A better question would be why doesnt Microsoft add support for market data to their software and systems? Argueably the most valuable information in the world.

I wonder if anyone remembers how far off the mark they were with WOSA XRT?

*rant*rant*rant* At least I feel better after venting...

tata

craig

marc said...

OK, OK, I admit that I was not thinking about something like OPRA publishing 456,000 messages per second, nor was I considering things like entitlements, exchange fees, etc. I was being slightly old-fashioned and was mainly thinking about replacing the Excel RTD mechanism to receive a limited set of conflated quotes. (What you call blended quotes.)

Hmmff... I should have known better than to sneak that statement past the most knowledgable market data guru on Wall Street! You sunk my battleship...

Anonymous said...

Im not sure you are wrong. Why cant an ESB do video, market data, and other forms of data that have special transport considerations? The finanical industry seems to be on a quest to find a single messaging solution for all their data needs. gigE and IB seem to fit the bill pretty well at the hardware level - I dont see why someone could not create an ESB on top that could escapsulate and manage the different transports.

My thinking is that ESB vendors want to entrench their proprietary APIs and wire formats and generally arent open to non-standard delivery mechanisms from other vendors. But I could be wrong, perhaps they just dont get the requirement. Certainly financial institutions that spend $$$ on their own solutions dont want to share :-)

Anonymous said...

Old but relevant: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/BTS_2004WP/html/47850cbd-63ed-4370-a467-6bd320636902.asp

Anonymous said...

Not sure Microsofts ESB is really in the same ballpart as RV: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193104592