An affiliate of business intelligence vendor Information Builders Inc., iWay develops enterprise integration applications.

The company recently embarked on a series of "best-practice" tours in Canada to consult with businesses and understand business challenges around integration, said Jake Freivald, vice-president of iWay Software.

"People were interested in finding out what [integration] is, but they have no definition of the benefits, and they don't even understand the acronyms," said Freivald.

Through integration, disparate applications, data, processes and people can communicate with one another through business-defined processes. Integrated business processes don't simply allow a user to call up a particular application, but actually provide information in a manner or form that's simple and consistent with a business' requirements, Freivald said.

IWay recently launched its new enterprise service bus (ESB) offering dubbed, iWay SOA Middleware, which the company claims would enable organizations to build a SOA by reusing existing apps regardless of the technology underneath.