iWay Supports OS/400 with New SOA Middleware Suite

Published: February 7, 2006

by Alex Woodie

iWay Software last week announced iWay SOA Middleware, a suite of products designed to help companies implement and manage a service oriented architecture (SOA). The company says its new suite will satisfy the most stringent requirements of companies looking to integrate ERP, CRM, and business intelligence applications, without binding them to a proprietary architecture.

The iWay SOA Middleware suite is composed of various parts, including the iWay Service Manager, an enterprise service bus (ESB) offering, and the hub of the new suite. Service Manager includes a variety of graphical design tools for defining transformations and incorporating existing programming interfaces from popular ERP applications, as well as a runtime engine that generates compliant Web Service Description Language (WSDLs), and can run on the iSeries server, in addition to other popular platforms. Monitoring of Web service usage, and enforcement of usage policies, is handled through the iWay Service Monitor and iWay Service Policy Manager components of the suite.

Another component is the iWay Trading Manager, an add-on to the iWay Service Manager that delivers a portal where trading partners can self-provision access to the B2B gateway and organize their informational flows and formats. Also plugging into the iWay Service Manager hub is iWay Enterprise Index, a search engine that's based on the Google Search Appliance, and which is designed to provide a standardized (XML-based) way of searching for specific data in ERP systems, databases, and other business applications.

Last but not least is the iWay Process Manager, an Eclipse-based graphical interface that helps users build and simulate business processes, create expressions, reuse common business process execution language (BPEL) snippets, and ensure the validity of BPEL, iWay says.

iWay says one of the key advantages of its SOA approach and its ESB offering is that it "helps organizations adopt standards without being limited to them." For example, the software can be used to help organizations to use the same service as a Web service or through proprietary middleware offerings. "iWay Software has approached integration in the same way since the company was founded five years ago, addressing the most complex nuances of enterprise integration while other vendors shy away from the heavy lifting," said John Senor, president of iWay Software.