Ignoring the fly in the ointment: iWay releases Enterprise Integration Suite

I continue to be surprised at the lack of comment around the change in strategy announced by iWay a couple of months back and now followed through with the release of its Enterprise Integration Suite.  For those of you who don’t know who iWay are: they are the division of Information Builders, which had focused on selling adapters to a multiplicity of applications and technologies.  In particular, they have a wide set of reseller/OEM partnerships (as can seen on their partner page) with many vendors who are also in the business of selling ESBs/Enterprise Integration Suites such as Sonic Software, Software AG, Metaserver, In terSystems, Cordys as well as big boys, IBM and Oracle. 

Lets take the example of Sonic, if you go to their webpage you can see a very impressive list of adapters. If you select one, say for Siebel, and look at the datasheet – guess what:  it is the iWay adapter. In fact most if not all of the 250 claimed are actually iWay adapters.

I am sure company spokespersons from iWay and its partners will say the new announcements from iWay doesn’t change anything – trusted partner blah blah blah.  This simply doesn’t wash, no sales person from Sonic or Software AG or the rest is going to feel comfortable introducing a competitor’s product into their accounts as part of their core value proposition. This leaves all of these vendors with a big problem with their current value proposition:  no out of the box adapters (one of the headline features of most ESB offerings) and one which they can only address in three ways:

1. Write their own adapters

2. Go to the only other source I know of (NetManage who acquired Librados last year) and risk being hit with the same problem when NetManage realize that they can also leverage their position in the market to grow a new business.

3. Make the big leap to say that enterprise adapters aren’t important(!)

In defence of option 1, while it will take time and money, there are probably not a huge number really needed (who actually wants a Candle Roma or Digital Standard MUMPS adapter these days?).

There are of course two bigger questions:

• Why did they get into this mess in the first place (it was obvious to me at least that it was an accident waiting to happen)?

• Why is iWay risking their adapter line of business?  The only conclusion can be that they think they can sell more adapters on their own than through partner channels.

And finally, what does this mean for the end-users who may be considering buying an iWay adapter from Sonic Software, Software AG et al? If your project is more about the adapters than the bit in the middle, I can only recommend going direct to iWay. If the reverse is true, I feel that you must treat the adapters with caution and probably look for alternatives (perhaps even custom coding the few you need).

Comments

[brenda michelson]

Ok, I'll bite... what about "3 Make the big leap to say that enterprise adapters aren’t important(!)"?

-brenda

[Ronan Bradley]

Brenda,

They are probably a lot less important to these vendors than one would initially expect - although not ignorable: hence the OEM strategy.

From my own experience and knowledge of what other ESB vendors are selling, the JCA style application adapters are not used that often. They are probably included in proposals a lot more often than they are actually bought (something that was also the case with the EAI vendors who paraded their huge catalogs of adapters knowing that only a couple were ever needed).

Why is this? Perhaps, it is because the challenge of writing a custom adapter isn't as hard as it used to be: The data you want to get at can be accessed from the database underlying these systems or from an existing client in both cases by-passing the pain of the Enterprise Application vendor's own interfaces.

I would be interested in your own thoughts on this one.

Ronan