Manulife analysis of enterprise service bus (ESB)

Manulife Financial (Manulife) is a leading financial services corporation operating in 22 countries and offering services to millions of people. It operates as Manulife Financial in Canada and Asia, and as John Hancock in the Unites States. The company offers a variety of financial products including wealth management services, insurance, and group benefits. The company has approximately $500 billion in assets. As part of the “Less Paper Action” Manulife has attempted to eliminate paper forms for products where legislation permits; thus, the number of web applications that Manulife develops is growing rapidly to satisfy this goal. The Individual Wealth Management (IWM) eServices team is responsible for developing and consulting for all web applications created within the Canadian Division of Manulife starting in July 2010. The team has decided to complete this work by further developing and refining the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which the team has been using. The team considered purchasing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) from a third party. As part of this process, the current architecture, the needs of the company, and the benefits and deficiencies of an ESB, needed to be analyzed.

Timothy Worboys, a co-op student from the University of Waterloo, was asked to investigate the ESB effect on enterprise performance.