WebSphere® ESB 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 e-mail systems.
With the help of an adapter, the application and EIS can "talk to each other," or, in other words, send and retrieve information in a consistent way. To allow your applications to operate as services, the adapter connects them to WebSphere ESB, 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.