The end of the year gives some time to relax, watch television and to read the many blog posts that have piled up in my reader. A lot of cloud stuff obviously, predictions for next year. James Urquhart mentions 7 businesses to watch out for, and on nr 2 is “Enterprise Integration as a Service”. Couldn’t agree more.
Urquhart refers to Boomi as an example of Integration through the cloud. I remember Boomi as a smaller B2B software vendor from around the period the AS2 protocol took off. Boomi’s cloud offering and pricing remain a bit blurry to me. Should play around with the 30-day trial some day. But not today, Dec. 31st 
What I don’t understand is that John M Willis picks RabbitMQ as the “Best Cloud Orchestration Tools in the Cloud”. RabbitMQ is a messaging solution based on the AMQP standard protocol. Maybe I’m overlooking something, but I don’t see any AMQP whatsoever in the B2B integration space.
January 2nd, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Speaking on behalf of RabbitMQ / AMQP …
We do have quite a few customers with applications in the B2B space. Annoyingly the main B2B players tend to be larger enterprises who don’t make all their plans as public as others (eg the ‘web’ and ‘cloud’ communities).
Regarding John’s motivations – you will have to ask him! But, I can say that we have a LOT of customers using ‘cloud based messaging’ for integration purposes, to scale and manage cloud apps, and for orchestration and work management.
As you state, RabbitMQ is a *messaging* solution used for pubsub, queues and streams which very often means that (like a database for example) its role is ‘hidden’ beneath complementary layers eg ‘cloud integration tools’.
We try to keep track of use cases that people *do* talk about, using delicious. For example here: http://delicious.com/alexisrichardson/rabbitmq+cloud+usecase (Note the tags).
I hope this helps shed some light on why EAI as a service might lead to more B2B use cases for AMQP.
Cheers,
alexis
RabbitMQ