Capabilities of an ESB

Just saw Mark Richards presentation on ESB. The presentation is simple and easy to understand without all the fancy jargon.
The streaming video is available at: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Enterprise-Service-Bus

Capabilites of an ESB:

Routing: This is the ability to route a request to a particular service provider based on some criteria. Note that there are many different types of routing and not all ESB providers offer them i.e. static, content-based, policy-based. This is a core capability that an ESB has to offer (at least static routing). Without it a product cannot be considered an ESB.

Message transformation: Ability to convert the incoming business request to a format understood by the service provider (can include re-structuring the message as well).

Message enhancement: We don't want to change the client and in order to do that we often need to enhance (removing or adding information, rules based enhancement) the message sent to the service provider.

Protocol transformation: The ability to accept one type of protocol as input and communicate to the service provider through a different protocol (XML/HTTP->RMI, etc).

Message Processing: Ability to perform request management by accepting an input request and ensuring delivery back through message synchronization i.e queue management.

Service orchestration: Low-level coordination of different service implementations. Hopefully it has nothing to do with BPEL. It's usually implemented through aggregate services or interprocess communication.

Transaction management: The ability to provide a single unit of work for a service request for the coordination of multiple services. Usually very limited since it's difficult to propagate the transaction between different services. But at least the ESB should provide a framework for compensating transactions.

Security: Provides the A's of security. There are no "silos" in SOA so the ESB has to be able to provide this.