Integration Platform as a Service: The Next Generation of ESB, Part 1
Economic challenges continue to drive organizations to reduce costs and improve service quality for enterprise integration
An ESB, or enterprise service bus, is a pattern whereby a centralized software component performs integrations to backend systems (and translations of data models, deep connectivity, routing, and requests) and makes those integrations and translations available as service interfaces for reuse by new applications. The ESB pattern is typically implemented using a specially designed integration runtime and toolset that ensure the best possible productivity.
Source: IBM