Business-to-Business Middleware

What is Middleware?

Middleware is the software that connects network-based requests generated by a client to the back-end data the client is requesting. It is a general term for software that serves to "glue together" separate, often complex and already existing programs.

Middleware programs come in on-premises software and cloud services, and they can be used independently or together, depending upon the use case. While cloud providers bundle middleware into cloud services suites, such as middleware as a service (MWaaS) or integration PaaS (iPaaS), industry researchers note that many businesses still choose independent middleware products that fit their specific needs.

How middleware works

All network-based requests are essentially attempts to interact with back-end data. That data might be something as simple as an image to display or a video to play, or it could be as complex as a history of banking transactions.

The requested data can take on many different forms  and may be stored in a variety of ways, such as coming from a file server, fetched from a message queue or persisted in a database. The role of middleware is to enable and ease access to those back-end resources.

Middleware categories

In general, IT industry analysts -- such as Gartner Inc. and Forrester Research -- put middleware into two categories: enterprise integration middleware and platform middleware.

• Enterprise application integration middleware enables programmers to create business applications without having to custom-craft integrations for each new application. Here, middleware helps software and services components work together, providing a layer of functionality for data consistency and multi-enterprise or B2B integration. Typically, integration middleware provides messaging services, so different applications can communicate using messaging frameworks like Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), web services, Representational State Transfer (REST) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Other middleware technologies used in this category include Object Request Brokers (ORBs), data representation technologies like XML and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and more.

Businesses can purchase individual middleware products or on-premises or cloud-based application integration suites.

• Platform middleware supports software development and delivery by providing a runtime hosting environment, such as a container, for application program logic. Its primary components are in-memory and enterprise application servers, as well as web servers and content management. Middleware includes web servers, application servers, content management systems and similar tools that support application development and delivery. Generally, embedded or external communications middleware allows different communications tools to work together. These communications tools enable application and service interaction. Resource management services, such as Microsoft Azure Resource Manager, host application program logic at runtime, another key function in platform middleware. Other components include Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) and in-memory data grids (IMDGs).

Platform middleware products are also available as specific on-premises or cloud service tools, as well  as multitool suites. On a cloud suite site, middleware as a service offers an integrated set of platform tools and the runtime environment.