Easy bus is in its essence an Enterprise Service Bus implementation built on top of the Microsoft BizTalk Server engine.
With the Easy bus suite we aim at more uniformity, shortened and simplified development and simplified maintenance and support, governing as many as possible “Business Process Management” implementations in your landscape. Easy bus handles any process your business requires in a standardized way and offers a great number of extra facilities out-of-the-box, such as process monitoring and exception handling.

  • RAD (Rapid Application Development)
    Easy bus supplies reusable components and structures that, together, make up the majority of required ‘plumbing’ for any existing or new process. New solutions or components can be added to your larger landscape in a very way similar to the familiar ‘Lego’ building blocks. This out-of-the-box plumbing keeps developers safe from the many pitfalls that are often made and even more often are not discovered until they pose an actual problem in one of your projects.
  • Generic fault- and exception-handling
    Easy bus provides uniformity over all processes so that each artefact does not have to be (re-)developed, tested or maintained for any (or every) specific project or component. Also, the exception-handling framework provides separation between technical and functional exceptions. (i.e. technical as in: database is not accessible, functional as in: a customer submitted an incorrect request/message/value.) By maintaining the correct scope, the administrators can act upon disturbances he/she can actually solve, reducing workload, irritation and overall result in a reduced time before matters are resolved.
  • Process monitoring
    Easy bus implements monitoring of all (and over all) processes such that processes that stagnate or take ‘just’ longer than normally expected are identified, allowing administrators to act before this becomes a real disturbance or end users/customers notice abnormal behavior.

While there are several other competitor ESB products in the market (among others for example the BizTalk ESB package, now considered obsolete), let’s consider how Easy bus meets common business demands and issues.

Initial investments
ESB products in general require high initial investments: this concerns not just the licenses (e.g. Microsoft’s own ESB toolkit for BizTalk can only be used with the most extensive ‘Enterprise’ edition of BizTalk) but also the re-organization of an organization’s landscape and the required expertise.
Easy bus is a low-entry software suite. Many organizations with Enterprise software-agreements already have access to SQL Server and/or BizTalk at no additional cost. Smaller organizations can do with ‘Standard’ licenses so investments can be kept at a minimum. When the situation arises, Easy bus can be scaled to your specific needs in many ways. Moreover, the Easy bus kernel and solutions are designed to be BizTalk version independent, while remaining fully compatible with the Microsoft enterprise family of maintenance and administration tools (such as SCOM) and extending on tooling familiar to your developers like Visual Studio

Specialist expertise
ESB products often require specialist expertise to design, develop, deploy and maintain a business solution. Even more than in related fields of expertise, deploying BizTalk applications usually requires highly skilled and experienced specialist administrators. This expertise is usually not found within a few individuals or even your own organization, resulting in large teams that rely on external (and more expensive) personnel.
During the development phase of a project, Easy bus offers a framework that aims at removing the majority of ESB pitfalls, difficulties and infrastructure from your solution by offering the developer standardized components to work with. This greatly reduces the specific BizTalk and specialist ESB/SOA knowledge required and opens up this field of expertise to the more all-round and readily available developers within your organization or ‘local’ market. In many situations these developers actually prove to be more familiar with the business demands on which they can now fully focus. Obviously this reduces the initial and overall project risk and cost.
No less important, the complexity of deployment and maintenance of such applications has been greatly simplified. Easy bus provides extensive and powerful but easy tooling that deploys all applications and components, on initial roll-out or update to your own IT-environment.

Complexity
ESB products are very often complex pieces of software and offer a lot of functionality that needs to be addressed but isn’t even required for the majority of targeted business-demands. Implementing an ESB is normally not at all easy, you can’t just simply install some software, let magic happen and hope to have it handle all your integration problems. Every business process is specific to your situation and every connection you need to implement requires careful planning, because of course you want to build it well and build it only once. Many providers say their product or solution is easy to interface with because they use standard protocols. That is only partly true. Even interfaces that are using standard protocols are sometimes hard to implement because you need to program against another application’s functional behavior. This usually means that projects are harder than they seem, and require more time and effort. And when you finally have a good working solution you want to be able to re-use it the next time it’s needed.
That’s where Easy bus comes into the picture, because it helps you do just that!
Easy bus is an ESB suite that is designed and built to offer functionality “out of the box” allowing you to solve most cases without reinventing the wheel or worrying about the larger-scale plumbing that has little or nothing to do with your central business-case.
Last but not least, is that its focus is not solely on a technical solution. Easy bus facilitates/offers guidance on many competences like overall IT-landscape, development methodology, deployment, that of technical and especially functional administration.
By using the Easy bus suite, your organization can, without costly or time-consuming surprises, fully focus on the actual business demand and still benefit from the advantages an organization-wide standardized development- and maintenance process offers.