The iWay Software subsidiary of Information Builders Inc. will announce Wednesday a new Web services framework to integrate disparate information systems.
This framework, known as iWay Business Services, will provide access to more than 140 proprietary information systems, iWay officials said. They said iWay Business Services will provide faster, more cost-effective integration of disparate information systems.
iWay Business Services will include support for standards such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Definition Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration).
These standards provide a framework for connecting disparate, legacy systems without having to write new code, iWay officials said.
Developers instead use a graphical workbench to automatically generate iWay Business Services, which are Web Services that incorporate or reuse data or function from existing systems, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems.
The systems can then become interoperable with each other via the Internet, and data can be shared with Information Builders WebFocus business intelligence platform or other BI tools.
Business Objects SA is also getting into the Web services act. The business intelligence software developer will announce its Web Services SDK Monday. This API will allow developers to build extranets that link organizations with the rest of their value chains by integrating data from their disparate applications.
Companies in the value chain will be able to exchange business intelligence through a central directory, built on UDDI. The Web services themselves will be SOAP-based.
iWay Business Services is available now. The Business Objects Web Services SDK will be available in beta later this month, with general availability on .Net and J2EE slated for the second quarter of next year.