Why Blackbird?
Blackbird is the first ESB written for PHP developers. PHP has a great deal of potential, but it is often skipped over in favor of Java when "back-end" application code is written. At ITema, we've found that PHP is actually perfectly suited to the work we do to pay our mortgages, but we were constantly re-inventing the wheels ESB users don't have to re-invent to get our applications to talk to each other. Also, since many of the applications we support were also written in PHP (such as SugarCRM), PHP was a natural fit for us.
We wrote Blackbird to fill a hole - there was no ESB product that was well suited to PHP development. We were also fed up with many of the Java ESB products we evaluated. Some were memory hogs, others weren't even complete (lacking "minor" features like, ahem, security), and a few weren't even real products - they were just re-branded packages that kitted together other packages into one collection. And Blackbird fills this hole nicely.
It does away with a phrase commonly associated with other solutions: "architect's dream, developer's nightmare." Written for developers by developers, Blackbird's primary goal is to make the process quick and painless. If you're writing an application you expect to work on with 60 developers and 10 architects for a year, Blackbird may not be for you. If you're just trying to get something done today, and make future expansion day-long projects instead of year-long struggles, it probably is!