Network Manager™ can interface to external systems and customer applications in various ways depending on the characteristics and capabilities of the system to be interfaced. The use of these standard interfaces makes it possible for users to write their own applications or connect external systems that access data from the Network Manager real-time and historical databases or uses Network Manager system services. Transparent usage over wide and local area networks and in heterogenous computer environments is supported. Since these interfaces are guaranteed to be unchanged over time, investment in customer application development is protected if release upgrades of the main system are performed.

Many types of interfaces are supported including flat files and direct database connections like SQL Net. An emerging technology is Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) where communication is based on the publish-subscribe paradigm. This method enables easy extensions of additional receivers (subscribers) of the data as the sender (publisher) does not need to be reconfigured. Network Manager has adaptors for the major MOMs like TIBCO, Vittria, and IBM. CORBA (OMG) and COM (Microsoft) middleware is supported. CORBA interfaces both for internal and external data exchange are available. Subsets of the DAIS and HDAIS OMG standards (refer to www.omg.com) are supported. Bridges to the corresponding COM based OPC standards also exists.