Here is a 1-paragraph summary of the text, covering the key points: An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a software middleware that facilitates communication between multiple services in an enterprise. It was initially conceived as a component within Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but its role has largely been superseded by newer architectural frameworks such as microservices and cloud-native technologies. ESB provides a stable communications bus between services, ensuring adequate de-coupling and enabling the integration of multiple services, external services, protocol and message transformations, legacy applications, and other use cases. Although considered a legacy technology, ESB is still used to support legacy applications and will continue to serve for the next few years. Its influence can be seen in newer architectural models such as service mesh and iPaaS, which build upon its concepts and mechanisms for handling inter-service communication.