he term "middleware" is a fairly new term and as yet remains unfamiliar to many in the computing industry. Products performing a middleware function were introduced in the late 1980s and were described by different terms. Some were touted as client/server products, but that marketplace has come to mean point-and-click rapid application development tools. Others called themselves message buses or distributed database products.

Today, middleware refers to those products which sit between applications and the network. They form a network operating system which:

1. Lets incompatible programs communicate with each other over the network and
   
2. lets programs access and update foreign legacy or SQL data distributed across the network.

Middleware allows a company to integrate the data and business rules which to date have been isolated on its disparate, incompatible legacy systems into a common, enterprise-wide knowledge base and then to open this information to today's modern technologies of workstations, LANs, and SQL databases.

NetWeave has chosen to specialize in that middleware marketplace segment which addresses the needs of mission-critical distributed applications. Mission-critical refers to enterprise dependence, often interpreted as "bet your company." Distributed implies heterogeneity - any number of incompatible systems may be involved in the business process that must appear seamless to the user.

For a middleware product to satisfy mission-critical, distributed application needs, it must possess the following attributes:

High Performance - fast response time with minimum stress on system computing, networking, and database resources.

Scaleable - handles growth both in term of functional growth and volume growth.

Reliable - able to continue in the presence of, or recover gracefully from, any fault in the system.

Data Integrity - no system fault will compromise the information maintained by the system.

NetWeave is designed specifically to support the high performance, scalability, reliability, data integrity, and heterogeneous needs of mission-critical distributed applications. More so than any other middleware product today, NetWeave offers the widest range of services over the greatest number of platforms.

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