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ESBs have become the cornerstone of many SOA deployments, providing a reliable and flexible integration backbone across enterprises. However, the Cloud Computing model has given ESBs a new lease of life as the link between the safe, secure world behind the firewall and the great unknown of the Cloud.

As ESB vendors look for more reasons for users to buy their products, the Cloud model has emerged at just the right time. Companies looking to take advantage of Cloud Computing quickly discover that because of key inhibitors like data location, they are forced to run applications that are spread between the Cloud and the Enterprise. But the idea of hooking up the safe, secure world of the enterprise, hiding behind its firewall, and the Cloud which lies out in the big, wide and potentially hostile world is frightening to many. Step forward the ESB – multi-platform integration with security and flexibility, able to hook up different types of applications and platforms efficiently and securely.

More and more ESB vendors are now jumping on the ‘Cloud ESB’ bandwagon. Cast Iron, now part of IBM, made a great name for itself as the ESB for hooking Salesforce.com with in-house applications; Open Source vendor MuleSource has been quick to point to the advantages of its Mule ESB as a cost-effective route to cloud integration; Fiorano has tied its flag to the Cloud bandwagon too, developing some notable successes. Recently, for instance, Fiorano announced that Switzerland’s Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) had adopted the Fiorano Cloud ESB to integrate 70 on-premise applications with its Salesforce.com CRM system.

Over the next few months, we expect to see a growing number of these ‘cloud ESB’ implementations as more companies realize the potential benefits of combining ESBs and Cloud.