Working with adapters

IBM® Business Process Manager supports two types of adapters: WebSphere® Adapters and WebSphere Business Integration Adapters. Adapters enable business applications to act as services by connecting them to diverse enterprise information systems (EISs), such as databases, enterprise resource planning systems, file systems, and email systems.

With the help of an adapter, the application and EIS can communicate, sending and retrieving information in a consistent way. To allow your applications to operate as services, the adapter connects them to IBM Business Process Manager, which powers your Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). With an adapter, you no longer need to provide proprietary connection utilities (or write custom connection utilities) for each EIS or application server.