News

iWay gets in the middle of SOA race

• By Stephen Swoyer
• February 8, 2006

iWay Software has long been Information Builders' ace in the hole. It's a bona fide data integration spin-off, with more than 285 different adapters into a host of apps and data sources. What's more, iWay software is licensed by a number of industry heavyweights, including BEA Systems, SAP and Sun Microsystems, among others.

Last week, Information Builders (IBI) announced iWay SOA Middleware, an SOA-ready bundling of several iWay components. It helps retrofit iWay for service-enablement, and it also marks the debut of the iWay enterprise service bus.

IBI's iWay adapter stack doesn't comprise an ETL toolkit, per se. It's analogous to an enterprise information integration solution, in that it facilitates federated access to back-end data. This makes it ideal for service-enablement scenarios because it facilitates access to data where it resides, and it lets customers create virtual or composite views of heterogeneous data sources.

The SOA Middleware offering consists of components including iWay Service Manager (the ESB); iWay Service Monitor (which provides monitoring capabilities for the Service Manager); iWay Service Policy Manager (which implements usage and security policy management); iWay Process Manager (a BPEL-based business process management tool); iWay Trading Manager (a lightweight partner agreement management tool); and iWay Enterprise Index (which extends the search capabilities of the Google Search Appliance). For more information, visit iWay.