The toolset originally supported the information technology engineering methodology developed by Clive Finkelstein, James Martin and others in the early 1980s.
In addition, other platforms are now supported such as many variants of Unix-like Operating Systems (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux) as well as Windows.
Its range of supported database technologies have widened to include ORACLE, Microsoft SQL Server, ODBC, JDBC as well as the original DB2.
The toolset is fully integrated - objects identified during analysis carry forward into design without redefinition.
IEF was intended to shield the developer from the complexities of building complete multi-tier cross-platform applications.
Under CA, recent releases of the tool added support for the CA-Datacom DBMS, the Linux operating system, C# code generation and ASP.NET web clients.