How does IBM connectivity and integration portfolio compare to Oracle?

The ability of enterprises to create new applications is limited by the ways those applications can reuse existing business logic and data. This explains huge interest in messaging and connectivity products. Some call them ESBs, others call them SOA products, but no matter what you call it, this kind of specialized middleware must provide a set of capabilities that make it easier to connect to many different types of old and new applications, data formats, protocols and be able to perform transformation of the above mentioned things. Synchronous, asynchronous, transactional, reliable and high performance capabilities are a big plus (as they say in job postings).

Where there is demand, there is usually supply. In case of IBM and Oracle, both vendors provide a set of offerings that claim to solve the problem of connectivity. Both vendors claim that they have the “most complete integration solution on the planet”. I decided to take a look and compare. In this first article of the series I will simply look at the products at a high level and in subsequent articles will look into specifics and more in-depth technical and financial TCO comparisons between products. Here is how offerings from these two vendors stack up to each other. Please note that color coding on this comparison is meant to reflect the strength of the product based on (a) Technical capabilities (performance, feature richness, security, scalability, etc.) and (b) Market position (number of users, market share, history, release schedules, analysts’ feedback, etc.).

By: Roman Kharkovski
Source: http://smarterquestions.org/2013/03/how-does-ibm-connectivity-and-integration-portfolio-compare-to-oracle/