What are Adapters?

Adapters
Business information is distributed among different business applications (such as SAP R/3 or PeopleSoft) or available from databases or files. Adapters help make this information available to the business process by "adapting" the applications to a common messaging system.
What are Adapters?
Adapters translate information into the appropriate format:
Adapters receive information from a source application and publish it to the business process in a shared format.
Adapters subscribe to information from a business process and translate it to a format the target application can understand.
Adapters can also be set up to work in a client/server mode (using remote operations.)
The illustration below shows how a Siebel customer service system communicates with the business process using an adapter publication service and the business process communicates with the PeopleSoft Order Management system using an adapter subscription service.