A resource provider works through a connector to interact with a connected system. A connector is configured to connect to a specific external system and effectively maps from the system specific language to ThingWorx language (e.g. Info Table). For instance, a Salesforce.com connector would have services that take a Query JSON object in ThingWorx to execute the query in Salesforce.com and return the result in an Info Table.

Both resource providers and connectors are Things in ThingWorx based on their thing templates. Each instance of a connected system should be represented as one connector thing that can be configured on multiple resource provider Things that provides different types of resources from the connected system. For example, both an asset and customer resource provider can be configured to the same Salesforce.com connector. The connector thing name is set on a resource provider as "connector" in the Resource Provider Configuration table.