iWay Goes Towards the ESB Light

iWay, the maker of over 300 adapters is now going the way of ESB as well, like many others, but is this really a good move long term?

iWay was originally started in 2001. It was a spin-off from Information Builder Inc. (IBI), and focused on adapters. I loved that strategy because adapters are a pain in the butt to both build and maintain, and having them available for outsourcing that work was a huge load off my mind in my past life as a CTO.

While iWay still plans to leverage its adapter base, the iWay Service Manager ESB will allow for distributed Web services creation and deployments with monitoring, policy management, trade management and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) workflow management all built into it. In other words, let's build an ESB that's like the other ESBs already out there.

I'm not sure I get this, but as long as iWay is not dumping their adapter business, I'm okay with it. Indeed everyone needs adapters, and iWay, along with a few other companies, are the only guys that provide them. Let me tell you, building them yourself is out of the question these days, and as SOAs grown in popularity and connectors are needed, iWay's adapter dance card will be full in the years to come.

The ESB space, however, is crowded and noisy. Moreover, it's unclear to me how ESBs enter into the SOA world long term, considering the whole information versus service/behavior-based integration concept. But, I won't beat that dead horse here.

Good luck to iWay with their ESB, but don't quit your day job building adapters.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on February 3, 2006 07:59 AM