Skolkovo and TAdviser identified the leaders of the Russian ESB solutions market

The Russian market for integration tires has undergone significant changes in recent years. The departure of foreign vendors stimulated the development of domestic solutions that seek to occupy the vacant niche.

There are several dozen ESB-class products on the market, most of which are young solutions. Among the systems investigated as part of the project, the earliest release was released in 2016. However, despite the relative youth of the Russian ESB market, it is saturated with quite mature solutions in terms of functionality.

Most of the 12 systems analyzed offer functionality comparable to foreign counterparts in the main functional areas, including integration interactions, data transfer and routing functions.

From a technological point of view, Russian products are inferior to foreign counterparts in performance and security parameters, but customers everywhere note that Russian products are actively developing, many flexible, scalable and fault-tolerant solutions appear on the market. Some vendors supplement their Low-code solutions with tools for modeling and configuring integration processes, which greatly simplifies the automation of business processes in general.

The project was carried out by experts from the Skolkovo Foundation and the TAdviser analytical center.

Based on the results of the study, a group of leaders among ESBs was identified, expert assessment based on the results of demo sessions confirmed a high level of functional readiness of products: Integration Gears, Digital Q.Integration, ENERGY, Datareon and RedMule.

The project consisted of several stages: survey of developers (self-assessment of software), demonstration of software products (expert assessment of software) and in-depth interviews with customers (demand assessment). The questionnaires were based on a specially developed reference model of the "best in class" ESB, which included 465 functional, technological and organizational criteria. This approach made it possible to see the breadth of the coverage of the functionality, the features of the technological platform, as well as to assess the organizational potential of the study participants.

The stage of in-depth interviews with end customers revealed the general problems of automating the management of customer relations in various, answers were industries economies received about the current practice of using ESB solutions, as well as about the development of the market, priorities and preferences in the selection of suppliers.

{{quote 'author = Aleksei Borisov, Director of Consulting, Research and Analytics of the Center for Expertise and Commercialization in the Information and Financial Technology Sector of the Skolkovo Foundation. | The study showed that despite the maturity of Russian solutions, large customers are cautious about Russian integration buses. Among the main barriers, experts see the lack of mature solutions for specific integration tasks, a relatively high share of open source components within products (for a number of industries - a critical factor), as well as the unsatisfactory quality of technical support for the product and the level of competence of specialists in the market.}}

{{quote 'author = Nikolay Kamennov, deputy editor-in-chief of TAdviser. | An important growth zone for most ESB vendors is insufficient focus on solving the business needs of customers. Large organizations expect developers of more business-oriented solutions, indicating that the market lacks ready-made integration products for specific business processes.}}

The study materials can be downloaded from the link.