Why Off The Shelf Adapters?

Why Off-the-Shelf Adapters?

Customers who have strategically positioned the iWay Universal Adapter Suite within their environment have realized the following key benefits.

Productivity

Increased productivity and IT efficiency. GUI productivity tools, that drastically reduce interface development cost and maintenance overhead, accelerate integration projects and enable IT to provide greater business value at less cost.
Reduced management overhead. iWay Software has dedicated teams that regularly update our suite to conform to application upgrades, evolving standards, and certification requirements, and to exploit new features and capabilities of information sources. iWay Software encapsulates the tedious infrastructure work so companies can focus on bettering their business.

Reusability

Change insulation. iWay Service Manager enables the reuse of interfaces to working mission-critical systems on framework-supported platforms, standards, and technologies. When changes in the business and technology landscape drive requirements for functionality repurposing, investment in adaptive software makes a quick, seamless transition possible.
Web services enabled. All iWay adapters can generate Web services with a couple of clicks, ensuring the open availability of key information assets.

Flexibility

Demands no redundant technologies and standards. iWay Software supports leading industry standards, ensuring that you get the most out of current technology investments.
Automatic document validation. iWay e-business adapters understand document formats and provide built-in validation for content that must conform to an enforced specification.
Complies with security standards. iWay adapters respect the native security structure and protocols of all supported technologies.

Business Agility

The above benefits result in increased business agility – the critical factor for growing or maintaining competitiveness in today's dynamic business environment.

Shift IT from process efficiency enabler to a change enabler. Change in the business landscape requires rewiring of the systems that enable defined processes. Rewiring can be a slow, expensive process that inhibits change. The iWay Universal Adapter Suite rapidly and cost-effectively translates process-enabling functionality into reusable services that allow overall IT functionality to evolve with and increase the competitiveness of the business.
Regulations and compliance. An adaptive layer prepares key technical processes and functionality for reuse, which is critical for complying with industry and legal regulations.
Cross-platform character set translation and national lauguage support. iWay adapters translate between the different character sets of different platforms and support a wide variety of national character sets, including DBCS for Asian-Pacific markets.

Why Prepackaged Adapters Over Hand-Coded Adapters?

While interface and application development require the same coding skills, they are different programming disciplines. The key difference between them is that an interface is a program that connects two independent system technologies, while an application is a self-contained system that provides business functionality. Adapters accelerate the time-consuming task of developing and modifying interfaces. Maintaining interfaces cost-effectively is not practical because the developer must be able to do the following for all interfaces:

Code the interface to scale
Code the interface for operations monitoring
Extend it to fit with other operations monitoring frameworks
Adapt the interface for different types of consumers
Modify the interface when standards change
Modify the interface when frequent change occurs to target and source apps
Modify the interface when business rules change
Modify the interface when the deployment environment changes
Modify the interface when the programming language changes

Prepackaged adapters are the correct strategic decision, especially when factoring the opportunity cost of a skilled developer's time into the decision.

Why iWay Adapters Versus Proprietary Adapters?

Proprietary adapters create interfaces that are not reusable. When organizations sacrifice reusability, business agility diminishes, which dramatically increases opportunity costs and negates EAI's original value proposition, as the proprietary adapters lock-in a proprietary platform. An adapter suite is the foundation of a scalable service-oriented architecture. iWay Software's Universal Adapter Suite insulates mission-critical, process-enabling functionality, from the always-changing business and technical landscape, resulting in reusable, low cost, high ROI integration.