Enterprise Access products, also referred to as gateways, are designed to provide access to popular database systems on Windows, UNIX, and Linux. The Enterprise Access server implements an interface similar in appearance and behavior to all supported database management systems (DBMS). This allows a single Enterprise Access client application to be used to access all of these data sources. The application does not know about the characteristics of the database system that it is accessing.

This approach allows the developer to build portable applications that can be used to access any supported database at run time. Thus, a single application can support access to Ingres, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 UDB.