Request for Information (RFI) for the provision of an Enterprise Service Bus

Overview The University of Portsmouth is seeking to engage the market with regards the refinement of its requirements to procure an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

We are seeking assistance to help shape and enhance our current requirements before tendering the solution to the market in the next stage of the procurement process.

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is traditionally used to orchestrate all integrations and consists of a few tools that consolidate bespoke developments into a single solution that is both flexible and easy to monitor.

These tools considerably reduce the work required to maintain communications between different applications.

At the time the University purchased the current ESB, most systems were hosted on site and very few of them communicated in a 'standard' way, instead of using bespoke integrations between systems.

The ESB purchased was intended to handle all these requirements with the flexibility to adapt to future requirements.

The University's approach to integrations has since changed; many on-site systems have been replaced with cloud hosted alternatives, and are becoming more standardised in the way they communicate, with a drive towards a publish and subscribe methodology.

The way the University pays for these systems is also changing - rather than buying licences, new solutions are typically based on pay per usage.

In the past we did not have to consider the amount of data we moved between systems; with cloud based systems we have to be careful because there is often a charge associated with moving data.