I have a vendor that lives for complexity and all the things that I’ve grown to hate in the “enterprise” software scene. They operate an Oracle ESB in conjunction with BPEL/OAG as their data-exchange.

Call me naive or “not enterprise” all you want, however, if I’m not mistaken the whole point of having an ESB is so you can take varying inbound and outbound data from disparate systems and transform them to their respective targets formats regardless of what the source data’s format may actually be.

Now back to said vendor… Rather than hang a simple web-service endpoint out there to exchange 7 fields and transform that data to the OAG format before queuing in the ESB. They’ve mandated a single-point of entry where everything is OAG compliant regardless if there’s 1 field or 100 fields in the exchange.

Absurd as that may sound, it’s not the most absurd. We have to implement a web-service on our end to exchange 2 fields. They’re now trying to mandate that we implement OAG on our end.

I’m reminded of Cindy Mitchell’s statement “bloated corrupt and incompetent” when she spoke of the current state of “enterprise” software at RailsConf 2007. If only I had the supporting picture of Terl/Cheney.