Executive Viewpoint

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iWay Software’s second year has seen great success in two lines of business: our Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) product line and our iWay adapter factory.

The XML Transformation Engine has been the star of the iWay show. By providing a lightweight, scalable, and easy-to-use alternative to integration brokers, the XML Transformation Engine has gained many adherents, especially in financial services, healthcare, and government. In this issue you’ll find out how Trustmark Insurance used it to create a HIPAA-compliant Claim Status application. The XML Transformation Engine is also the heart of innovative new products, such as the iWay Bioterrorism Response Suite. This product is a specially tailored version of the iWay Security Exchange, a product for homeland security that was introduced last issue. Based on work we’ve done with the New York City Department of Health, the suite simplifies the task of data gathering, integration and analysis needed to support the creation of bioterrorism response systems.

All this new iWay technology is sparking innovative usage by customers. One financial services client, for example, is using the Web services capabilities of the XML Transformation Engine to make data easily available throughout their organization. By creating iWay Business Services for a variety of legacy systems, relational databases, and applications, they have opened up their most complex and critical information systems for secure use by any authorized developer in their organization.

Not all of our successes are based on new capabilities. You can read in this issue about Bombardier Capital’s use of our tried-and-true ETL product line to rapidly create interfaces between SAP R/3 and a variety of other complex systems.

Our adapter factory has been getting quite a workout, too. This issue carries an interview with Eric Swift, lead product manager for BizTalk Server Adapter and Partner Strategy, who talks about the value that iWay Software provides to the Microsoft solution.

We’re also proud to announce a very close partnership with BEA, one of the leaders in the Java^TM application server market and an emerging leader in business integration. iWay adapters have been tailored to the BEA WebLogic environment and are being resold by BEA as their own. Of course, we continue to support our other major partners, including IBM, Oracle, and Ascential Software – and, naturally, we remain the information access engine behind Information Builders’ WebFOCUS.

We continue to make it easier to integrate any tool or application with any information asset. We recently added the iWay Business Services Explorer to our product family. It is a graphical tool that uses iWay adapters to allow users to “surf” into an iWay application that they want to integrate. For example, when it introspects SAP’s metadata repository it finds standard and custom modules and IDocs, and automatically exposes them as Web services. Similar capabilities exist for Siebel’s Business Integration Manager and other applications.

iWay Software continues to press forward to become a premier provider of integration software, and we’re being recognized for our efforts. The latest Gartner Group magic quadrant for EAI companies, for example, has iWay listed in the “visionary” category. (Elsewhere in this issue read an enlightening interview with Gartner Group’s Daryl Plummer.) We work hard to be visionary, and as this issue of Information Builders Magazine shows, our customers and partners appreciate it.

To keep up to date on iWay news and events, I invite you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, the iWay Fast Lane. You can sign up at www.iwaysoftware.com/new/eflash/index.html.