Advance™ was developed as an SOA solution with Gartner’s recognition of this need as our primary goal. In other words, Advance™ was built specifically to provide a service abstraction layer (i.e. the SOA integration layer) on top of existing applications to enable the integration of diverse systems into a smaller set of composite applications.

Our uniqueness employs the following subset of capabilities that we believe strongly differentiates us.

• Our code generation is a unique aspect of our solution and we are not aware of any other tools that generate the objects to reflect an object model. It is the only tool that we know of that combines object generation, domain-specific logic generation, and service generation. Code generation provides some of the primary benefits.
  
  • Less dependence on the IT department.
  • More immediate (real-time) realization of changes.
  • The housing of assets in a loosely-coupled, language-independent repository that can be reused no matter what the future technical solution might be.
• Advance™ offers the most complete independence from the IT development staff of any other tool we know of.
• Our unique approach to asset component support, such as governance, configuration, auditing, logging, monitoring, and reporting provide the real-time support necessary to make Advance™ truly dynamic.
• The way that we address metadata and ontology is quite unique. There are some similarities to other products; for example, other products provide a similar approach to an object model abstraction layer over system terminology. However, we believe our approach to metadata and ontology is unique for several reasons.
  
  • We have addressed life-cycles and versions in a unique way to allow multiple concurrent versions in a varying number of life cycles.
  • We have included Configuration metadata as part of the overall solution, rather than as a separate component that is closely tied to the development platform.
  • We provide an XML-based exchange layer for importing and exporting to other repositories for an enterprise-wide SDLC approach. 
  • Our metadata is unique to our method of generating domain-specific logic.
• We have learned how to reduce core software development components into groups (objects, systems, domains, services, and logic).
• We provide an easy-to-use auto-discovery mechanism for realizing System metadata mappings, although truthfully, this will become even easier in the future as we implement other auto-discovery features. It is on our development roadmap to provide auto-discovery from the System layer all the way to the Service layer, meaning that Logic will remain the primary aspect that still must be crafted within the tool.  Even for logic, however, we provide the concept of “named logic”, making it easy to reuse existing logic across multiple services.
• We have leveraged open source tools within our solution allowing us not to be tied to any particular vendor, platform, or technology. This means, for example, the end-customer will not find itself married to a specific hardware vendor, web server, security platform, or application server vendor because of Advance™.