AdroitLogic Announces Major New Release of UltraESB with an Enterprise Integration Platform and Developer Studio

A short while ago, we announced a major update to the UltraESB Enterprise Service Bus, called the UltraESB-X release. This is a rewrite of our high performance UltraESB Enterprise Service Bus run-time, on top of a new modular framework code-named Project-X. The new release retains the performance benefits introduced by the UltraESB, supporting HTTP/S exchanges with zero-copy data transfers and Non-blocking IO (NIO). This performance edge prompted Walmart to license our technology in 2013 to power its new integration platform; and for Kuoni GTA to support over half a billion requests per day, with its B2B travel API, since 2014.
 We also released the UltraStudio, a rich integration solution development studio to increase developer productivity. It enriches the end-to-end experience of integration development with powerful extensions and plugins to the popular IntelliJ IDEA IDE. The UltraStudio allows users to develop integration flows with a drag-and-drop palette of connectors and processors, and helps to test, debug and trace integration flows through the execution path, and view properties at each stage. The palette of connectors and processors keeps increasing, and its a simple effort to develop custom connectors and message processors, by end users. The YouTube video linked from Sajiths blog shows this in action.

The new Integration Platform announced today, offers integration capabilities as a service, over private, public or hybrid cloud based Docker containers, utilizing the Kubernetes framework for managing the run-time and availability. The Integration Platform becomes available as an on-demand service to multiple organizational units within an enterprise, allowing users to target different UltraESB-X deployments with varying availability requirements, over a set of shared physical resources. The platform manages the deployments and automatically repairs failed instances, guaranteeing availability and stability. In the event of a container failure, the incarnation details of the instance is retained to allow troubleshooting of the root cause, and the container instances thus retain state in an otherwise stateless container deployment to facilitate management. The metrics of each UltraESB-X runtime are reported to ElasticSearch which then powers a consolidated management and monitoring dashboard that manages the platform.

Try out the new products from our website, and the integration resources, samples and documentation from the new Developer site at http://developer.adroitlogic.org

Happy 7th Birthday AdroitLogic and UltraESB!

Today marks 7 years since the first public announcement from AdroitLogic about its core product, the UltraESB Enterprise Service Bus!

We've completed yet another year of success, and we are very close to releasing our upcoming products for 2017, the new UltraStudio with the UltraESB-X runtime, and the Integration Platform Server (IPS). The UltraStudio is a new Integrated Development Environment for the development, testing and deployment of integration flows into the new UltraESB-X runtime. The graphical user interface based on the worlds best IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, allows users to implement integration solutions faster and easier. The Integration Platform (IPS), based on Kubernetes and Docker, is able to deploy highly available integration services across a cluster, managed as a collection of lightweight containers. The services can be deployed on private, public and hybrid clouds as well. We will soon be releasing these new products, with an update to our web site and documentation, and also introduce a new developer site to help integration engineers use our products and solutions more easily.

During the past year, we've also increased our team size, and five more engineers have confirmed employment with us within next few months. And as we planned an year back, we successfully purchased our own property in March last year, and will now embark on setting up and moving into our own new office this year.

We look forward to yet another exciting year ahead, and believe that our efforts have enhanced the solutions for Enterprise Integration challenges, to many organizations across the world!

AdroitLogic and the UltraESB is 6 years!

The 19th of January 2016 marks 6 years since the UltraESB was first announced publicly; It also marks the completion of six years of success for AdroitLogic!

The last year was an exciting one, with our team size increasing more than two fold.. As a side effect, we've now run out of space and are actively looking for alternate locations to move into; with one of the possibilities being to purchase our own property and build our office the way we want.

On the technical front, we've developed the Enterprise Middleware Framework (EMW) last year, and deployed it in production, along with the IMonitor enhanced management console with detailed statistics and management capabilities with an Elastic Search back-end. Our core products are now available with Ansible based scripts for auto installation and configuration, including the configuration of large clusters - making the deployments easier for our customers. These enhancements will be made available to more customers this year, and detailed information about the EMW Framework, IMonitor and the Ansible scripts made publicly available.

The APIDirector and the AS2Gateway too have kept gaining traction over the past year, and we've now started investing in our Integration Platform as a Service endeavor, which is based on Containers. This would be the key product to be introduced during this coming year, along with our next major update with a secret project, currently code named 'X'.

We plan to start more aggressive marketing and sales activities, with enhanced web sites and documentation, and introduce a new Customer Portal to assist our customers with more valuable content and up-to date information. It will certainly be an exciting year ahead!

Electronic Invoicing Announced on the AS2Gateway

We've just announced support for electronic invoicing on the cloud based Free B2B Trading Gateway AS2Gateway! This allows users to invoice trading partners via EDIFACT INVOIC messages over AS2, using a simple and intuitive web interface

Recurrent invoicing is simplified as any invoice can be saved as a template and re-used multiple times. The AS2Gateway converts all the invoice details into an EDIFACT D93A INVOIC message right now, and soon will support the other versions, as well as X12 based messages such as the 810.

In the near future, the platform will add support for parsing and generation of more message types, which will allow users to easily generate an invoice based on a purchase order received; or an advanced shipping notification (ASN) etc.

The AS2Gateway offers a free tier to support most SMEs that are required to electronically invoice trading partners for payment. For larger users, a premium tier is available with advanced options (to be announced shortly!), and for retailers or large corporations, the AS2Gateway is available for on-premise private deployment.

ESB Performance Benchmarking Round 6 is coming..

AdroitLogic has just announced the Sixth round of ESB Performance Benchmarking today!

Round 5 introduced a public Amazon EC2 AMI image of all the ESB's that were included into the benchmark, and the next round has moved further by requesting vendors and/or contributors for submission of better optimized configurations for the different ESBs to be tested.

Stability and Performance are both important to any ESB, and the last round saw half of the selected ESBs not being able to complete the benchmark successfully. Each ESB has since releases new versions, and we look forward to testing each one successfully!

For more information, visit http://esbperformance.org and email info@adroitlogic.com if you are interested to participate closely with us during this round!

We've just launched our Free EDI/AS2 B2B Gateway - AS2Gateway.ORG

Since its launch in January 2010, the UltraESB has the only free and open source ESB that natively supported the widely used B2B trading protocol AS2 (Applicability Statement 2). AS2 is used extensively in the US, Europe and Asia for B2B integration especially in the Retail and Manufacturing industries, and the UltraESB has been used by many organizations to integrate EDI/AS2 systems with S/FTP, Web Services and XML style systems.

The UltraESB is now used to integrate with some of the largest retailers in Europe, and the US by multiple organizations and it was natural for us to see the potential in offering a Cloud hosted EDI/AS2 solution as a Service (SaaS).

The AS2Gateway is powered by our flagship product UltraESB, and offers free EDI/AS2 connectivity for SME's and certainly disrupts the traditional market place in both the features offered and the cost savings. For example, the free tier allows SMEs to trade electronically with upto 5 trading partners and offers 60 messages per month.

We've also just launched AS2Integration.ORG which is a resource site on AS2/EDI integration, as well as the documentation and user guide for the use of the AS2Gateway.

Utilizing the UltraESB underneath means that the flexibility is virtually limitless, and we will soon expand this service to include Electronic Invoicing, EDI document creation and processing as well!

The AS2Gateway begins its 'beta' testing phase today, and you can utilize all of its features for free until we move into production in a few more months! No credit cards are necessary for sign up - so get your AS2/EDI trading account from the Free AS2Gateway!

Read our Press Release about the launch for more details!

What happened to the Cat set amongst the Pigeons? - ESB Performance comparison

WSO2 Published an article titled "WSO2 ESB Performance (New)" today, after 2 and a half years since the last article on ESB performance - published in June 2008.

What's interesting to note is that unlike in the last three rounds of performance testing since June 2007, WSO2 does not compare its numbers against those of any other ESB.

The last time WSO2 published performance numbers, its CTO Paul Fremantle wrote the blog post Setting the Cat amongst the Pigeons stating "Now, I'm hoping the Mule guys will get their act together and provide a decent contest, because we couldn't get Mule to do HTTP KeepAlive without failing"

Previously WSO2 compared its performance against a proprietary ESB, Mule, and ServiceMix. A complete list of resources, and tools were shared under an Apache License to encourage other ESB vendors to run the same tests which were "fair" and open.

The folks at Mule did take the challenge, and published an article that showed performance of the Mule ESB, although it was not a true apples-to-apples comparison.

This time, WSO2 has not shared the configurations or the resources either, and for some unknown reason, have explicitly turned off HTTP keep-alives which generally improves performance. They compare against the WSO2 ESB v2.1.3 - which incidentally was not benchmarked publicly at any point in the past. Hence a 'comparison' becomes meaningless, irrespective of the fact that in quite many scenarios, the performance of the v3.0.1 has indeed decreased!

Note that on earlier occasions concurrency levels from 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640, 1280, 2560 were run, with each selected message size. However, deviating from this "fair" and "open" norm, this time a different approach was taken: "For each scenario each message size load is generated with concurrency varying from 20 to 300(increasing by 40 at each stage). Then the maximum transactions per second(TPS) achieved during this concurrency range is recorded as the Transactions per second(TPS) for the corresponding scenarios message size."

This begs the question - did the WSO2 ESB v3.0.1 crash after 300 concurrent users? when previous versions could handle up-to 2560 concurrent users??


I guess like some "other" companies that grows too large these days, WSO2 has finally closed its openness on the performance benchmarking as well. Its refraining from publishing any comparisons, as it cannot compare against the Free and Open Source UltraESB from AdroitLogic, which introduced Zero-copy proxying coupled with Java NIO for extreme performance levels, not yet achieved by others - although some have tried to.

AdroitLogic published performance metrics of the UltraESB in February 2010, and launched the ESB Performance site http://esbperformance.org to ensure that a "open" and "free" ESB Performance Benchmark will be available for anyone. The UltraESB "ships" this complete benchmark in its 30MB download - and makes it easy for anyone to compare the performance of the UltraESB with any other ESB - on any selected hardware and environment under "identical conditions"!

Finally, I know that WSO2 ran these tests over 4 months back, and since then they have possibly been busy to find a way to publish these results with minimum damage..

But I guess the Cat set amongst the Pigeons - is now no more! ..
and now, I'm expecting some fireworks!!