ESB Enablement of an International Corporate Acquisition, an Experience Report

When a large Chinese manufacturing company acquired a Western competitor, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) became a key enabler for the transition of business applications to their strategic infrastructure. Prior to the acquisition, their business model was based largely on domestic selling to distributors. The acquisition introduced new business models including relationship-based selling to large corporations and marketing custom configurations directly to consumers over the Internet. The company had to quickly incorporate substantial EDI connectivity and there was a significant learning curve for many on the team to learn the client´s ERP package. The project schedule was aggressive and a globally distributed development team was used. This required our team to proactively collaborate across many time zones and play unfamiliar development roles. The author describes approaches taken to address these problems as well as potential areas for improvement which should benefit others participating in similarly complex projects.