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Mainframe/Migration/Legacy
Business PerspectiveEDS Projects Eight Things to Watch in IT Organizations need to stay on top of eight significant IT issues or trends stated Jeff Wacker corporate futurist at EDS. However he told eChannelline he does not make predictions. That's for fortune tellers. …. (7) Legacy applications are too expensive to maintain. You cannot maintain those systems in a high growth environment stated Wacker. He estimated that 85 per cent of corporate IT's budget involves maintenance. What are we seeing is movement to a high degree of application modernization and applications rationalization. That is being able to understand and harvest the business rules of what is actually happening in those old legacy things. But put them in a way that is highly changeable highly flexible and highly efficient. That is not what we have right now. more > Mainframe Clone Maker to Continue Sales Program Despite IBM Patent Suit Platform Solutions is in the midst of an early ship program with trial customers and plans full commercial availability of its Intel-based IBM mainframe clones in early 2007. Executives at mainframe clone maker Platform Solutions said they will continue to sell systems based on IBM technology despite a patent infringement lawsuit Big Blue filed against the company last week. We're continuing as we always have to bring a product to market said Christian Reilly Platform Solutions' VP for product development. Reilly in an interview Wednesday said the company believes IBM's suit has no legal merit. We absolutely respect intellectual property and feel this lawsuit is unjustified said Reilly. Platform Solutions is in the midst of an early ship program with trial customers and plans full commercial availability of its Intel-based IBM mainframe clones in early 2007 said Reilly. The systems are configured to run IBM's z/OS and OS/390 operating systems atop Intel Itanium 2 processors instead of IBM's dedicated mainframe processors. more > Can IBM Defend the Mainframe? HP et al nibble away at the big iron market In spite of appearances to the contrary the hardware division's still pretty important to IBM. It must be or the company wouldn't have bothered spending a lot of time over the last month punting the goodness of its big iron product lines. In particular the company's under a bit of competitive pressure right now so it's keen on shouting about a resurgence of interest in the good old mainframe. So what's going on? For the past ten years or more IBM has presented itself as a services as much as a hardware company -- even though it's still one of the biggest software companies in the world. The $3.5 billion acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers' global business consulting and technology services unit in 2002 cemented Big Blue's image as a further distancing from its hardware roots -- even though interestingly the service division still barely figures in the company's official history. more > IBM Sues Make of Intel-Based Mainframe Clones In its second major patent enforcement action in as many months IBM is quietly suing an Intel-backed maker of computers that uses a version of IBM's high-end mainframe operating system reconfigured to run atop Intel's industry standard processors InformationWeek has learned. In a lawsuit IBM alleges that the mainframe emulator systems offered by Platform Solutions Inc. violate IBM patents on its z/OS operating system as well as patents relating to its previous mainframe operating system known as OS/390. On its Web site Platform Solutions claims that it offers a new generation of compatible mainframe computers designed to meet the rapidly changing business needs of today's enterprise. The company says its Intel 64-bit Itanium-based systems are fully compatible with z/OS and OS/390. IBM typically offers those operating systems for sale only with IBM mainframes running more expensive dedicated processors of its own manufacture. more > Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch In 2005 Windows servers eclipsed Unix servers for the first time in terms of revenue by nearly $200 million. According to IDC over $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers and $15.5 billion in Unix servers were sold worldwide in 2005. Additionally Linux took third place at $5.3 billion and mainframes slipped to $4.8 billion. With sales of approximately $2 billion in 2005 IBM's System i fell short of making the report. How is it that the grandfather of what was once the darling small business system family in the world (the IBM System/3 and System/3X) could have slipped so far off the radar screen? The fact is that in the 1970s the System/3 was the premiere small business machine giving way to the System/32 System/34 and finally the System/38 in 1978. In 1983 the System/36 continued this rich tradition of providing no-nonsense ease-of use computing for small businesses In those days whenever someone visualized a successful and omnipresent (for that time period) small business system it was inevitably an IBM model that started with the letters System/3X. The stark contrast with today's industry standards begs the question: What happened? more > Hitachi Unveils Blade Server with Hardware Virtualization Hitachi Unveils Blade Server with Hardware Virtualization Hitachi America Ltd. has announced BladeSymphony with Virtage a blade server to provide users with enterprise-class data center functionality. The new product the latest member of Hitachi BladeSymphony series includes Virtage an embedded virtualization feature. The feature which builds virtualization into a blade server's hardware provides customers an alternative to third-party software solutions and thus can enable them to decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance. BladeSymphony with Virtage also includes blade symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) interconnect technology that is designed to improve scalability by enabling users to configure multiple blades so that they work as a single system. BladeSymphony with Virtage will be generally available in North America in January and has been selected by several customers including Stanford University's Cardiovascular Biomechanics Research Laboratory (CBRL). more > The Healthcare Industry In Australia Is Increasingly Realizing The Benefits Of IT In Actualizing Bet Research and Markets has announced the addition of “Australian Hospital Information Systems Markets” to their offering. Increasing Realization of the Benefits of IT in Driving Efficiency Boosts the Hospital Information Systems Markets With the growing demand for safer and improved healthcare the healthcare industry in Australia is increasingly realizing the benefits of IT in actualizing better and more efficient patient care. Being a public-sector driven healthcare system government initiatives to improve the efficiency of the healthcare delivery by adopting IT systems is expected to be the major driver for the Australian hospital information systems (HIS) markets. As examples of these initiatives the Australian government has embarked on an ambitious project known as HealthConnect to build a national health information network. Likewise HealthSMART is another program that has been initiated to modernize and replace the IT systems throughout the Victorian public healthcare. This Frost & Sullivan research service is an analysis of the Australian hospital information systems markets. This research service is completely dedicated to the Australian market and identifies the major drivers and restraints in the hospital information systems (HIS) markets. Further in a market that is transitioning from the adoption of administrative solutions to clinical solutions it tracks the growth in terms of revenues of both the administrative and clinical systems market. more > Army Programs Moving Forward Within the next six months the Army will have a better idea of which of the approximately 60 legacy human resources systems will be shut down and which will be integrated with the Defense Department’s Integrated Military Human Resources System. DIMHRS is one of a handful of systems the Army’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems is focusing on over the next year in terms of how the service is modernizing its applications. Kevin Carroll head of the PEO EIS yesterday said his office would finish a plan by spring and then over the next year whittle down the multiple duplicative HR systems. Carroll and some of his staff spoke at a lunch in Arlington Va. sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association-Washington chapter. more > Linux Drives a Mainframe Revival Linux may not be everyone’s idea of a mainframe operating system but for a growing number of large and medium-sized businesses the synergy between Linux and big iron is the solution to a significant problem. Many users want to consolidate their burgeoning populations of distributed Linux applications and to find a way of applying centralised management and security. And when it comes to consolidation the System z takes some beating. IBM mainframe support was a late addition to the Linux repertoire. Work on the project began around 1997 and Linux/390 (the predecessor to zLinux) was rolled out in 1999 some eight years after Linus Torvalds first unveiled his software. more > Microsoft chief positions Longhorn as mainframe and Unix killer IT Forum Barcelona: Windows will not only dominate the desktop but every area of business infrastructure according to a leading Microsoft executive. Speaking on the opening morning of Microsoft's Tech-Ed IT Forum in Barcelona Bob Muglia Senior Vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business was bullish about the software giant's chances of moving up the enterprise ladder. The high end of business systems is traditionally the playground of custom designed systems and Unix mainframes. But Muglia claimed that both the new-found abilities and scalability of Microsoft SQL - in the form of SQL Server 2005 - and more importantly the advent of virtualisation would enable CTOs to migrate large business infrastructures wholesale to Windows platforms. He said that in contrast to the situation in the past there are now no business problems that cannot be solved with x86 hardware running Windows. more > Top Mainframe Stories and Vendor Announcements Most of you know that IBM's third quarter financial report showed nice gains for the System z division. That may be the silver lining but don't forget about the dark cloud that is the vendor channel. The channel doesn't put much of the System z money in its pocket. Reportedly Sam Palmisano IBM's chairman and chief executive officer has plans to change that. more > Blog: Are Mainframes Staging A Comeback? After making their debut some 50 years ago mainframes have experienced a steady decline for the past decade. Surprisingly this year IBM posted a whopping 25% mainframe revenue jump last quarter. Although this revenue jump isn't likely to be sustainable the industry noted an increased demand for mainframe computing. For example Hoplon Infotainment a startup video game company in Brazil relies on mainframesto operate its signature online game. IBM remains the world's largest manufacturer of mainframes and still produces the majority of them. The zSeries towers are IBM's newest offerings that are dubbed 'T-Rex due to their immense size and power (and $1 million price tag). more > HUD seeks modernized financial-management system The Housing and Urban Development Department seeks proposals to modernize its accounting and financial-management functions by moving its core legacy systems to the PeopleSoft suite of financial-management applications to create an integrated system. HUD is conducting a public-private competition for system integration and hosting at a shared-services center for the HUD Integrated Financial Management Improvement Project. The goal is to reduce disparate legacy systems and data and to be able to generate accurate and timely financial information so managers can make informed decisions. The end result will be the production of fully auditable financial statements throughout the department and potentially the Federal Housing Administration Ginnie Mae and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight HUD said in its posting yesterday on FedBizOpps more > The mainframe rolls on Though it dominated the computing world until the 1970s the proprietary mainframe computer has been the subject of an on-again/off-again death watch ever since. Yet IBM Corp.'s venerable 360 architecture is still around in the form of the company's System Z server line. And large organizations are still using it and even buying new machines. Case in point IBM Canada has just announced that the University of Toronto purchased a new System z9 Business Class mainframe. more > Mainframe: Should It Stay or Should It Go? An IT manager in a telecommunications company recently told me that he is waging a major battle over the mainframe. It seems that the high-level executives in IT (along with the company’s CIO) have been singing a familiar song: “The Mainframe Has Got to Go.” The execs are principally concerned with three things: • The costs associated with maintaining mainframe hardware and software. • The long-term availability of packaged software currently running on the mainframe. • The long-term availability of labor for mainframe applications. more > Software AG Announces crossvision Legacy Modernization Software AG today announced the availability of crossvision Legacy Modernization™ the most extensive portfolio of products and methodologies available to help organizations retain and extend the value of their investments in core enterprise systems. Founded on Software AG’s 37 years of experience in mission-critical data management crossvision Legacy Modernization enables customers to transform their legacy systems into modern and flexible business applications and processes. Using crossvision Legacy Modernization companies are better able to align valuable enterprise systems with IT strategies and business requirements. The announcement was made at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. more > Businesses merge old with new in their information systems according to new Aberdeen Report As businesses wade into a world of service-oriented architectures (SOA) to serve as the foundations of their information infrastructures they are utilizing different technology strategies to modernize the software applications that have been carrying the business data load for them over the past two decades according to a new Aberdeen Group benchmark report. The Legacy Application Modernization Benchmark Report details the strategies drivers and successes behind companies' efforts to move those older applications -- often called legacy systems -- into today's newer architectures especially SOA. Businesses are adopting SOA to give them greater visibility into their processes and allow them to react more quickly to changes in order to maintain competitive positions and reduce life-cycle software maintenance costs. more > Unix shops ignore signs of market decline Doug Burak calls his two midrange Unix servers the cornerstone of the computer services at Bucks County Community College (BCCC) where he is IT security director. Ken Edgecombe claims throughput has improved fivefold since upgrading to new midrange Unix servers at the High Performance Computing [HPC] Virtual Laboratory in Ontario Canada where he is director. Midrange Unix systems are getting squished like a sandwich from increasingly affordable mainframes from above and increasingly robust x86 systems from below. IBM's smaller mainframe now starts at $100 000 while many Unix systems cost at least twice as much. Meanwhile x86 systems are developing multicore processors to compete with the number-crunching computing that Unix has been known for. more > North Star Mutual modernizes applications with Unisys' clearpath mainframe North Star Mutual Insurance has completed deployment of new web-enabled application software powered by Unisys's clearpath Libra model 590 mainframe-class enterprise server. The software is designed to improve customer service cutting the quote process from days to seconds. Complementing a pay-for-use metering capability afforded by the system the new application reduces the time required to produce individualized insurance quotes improving service for both independent North Star agents and customers. more > Fashion house updates core systems Fashion accessories firm Meller Designs has installed a Syspro 6.0 distribution and financial system to achieve better visibility into its supply chain. The firm designs and supplies clothing gift sets and fashion jewelry to high street retailers such as Marks and Spencer Next and Dunnes sourcing manufacture through international partners. It has to respond speedily to seasonal and new market trends. Meller’s Syspro 6.0 installation project managed by Morgan Technology Consulting went live in April. The new software supplied by McGuffie Brunton replaced the company’s 20 year old legacy systems. more > Alliance and Leicester to Overhaul Core Systems Alliance & Leicester has announced plans replace many of its core banking systems with Accenture’s Alnova Financial Solutions banking platform under a three-year IT-led business transformation programme. The programme is intended to bring major back-office efficiencies and give the bank a single customer view. The bank will spend the first year of the programme working closely with Accenture to align the system and its business processes before beginning to roll out the platform across all business units. more > Zephyr profits from winds of change Wellington technology consultancy Zephyr has grown from two to 31 staff and contractors in just two years on the back of a booming market for high-end consulting. Now it has set up a software subsidiary Zephyr Solutions that hopes to persuade businesses and government departments to migrate their legacy systems on to new technology platforms rather than throw them away. The subsidiary has a foot in the door at Inland Revenue helping it migrate two minor applications from Cobol using automated tools that can rewrite code to run on .Net or Java. more > Downfall of the Mainframe -- Still alive and computing The demise of the mainframe is over rated. With the advent of mini computers client servers and mid range computers and their associated software technologists back in the end of the 80's predicted that mainframe systems would soon be obsolete. Along with this also came the prediction that mainframe technicians would no longer be needed. Their skills would become obsolete. In fact what has happened was that the mainframe technician is going by the way of the dinosaur and no replacements are being trained. Oh by the way the mainframe is not getting obsolete. The skills of the mainframe progammer are still in demand. More importantly these skills need to be passed on to a new team of players that can continue to maintain mainframe systems and applications. more > HP CIO: Too much money spent on IT support According to HP's executive vice president and CIO Randy Mott IT costs continue to escalate faster than the world's economies and the amount of support dedicated toward IT is also on an upward trend. The number of people involved in IT in the United States for instance is at its highest levels--this despite the country's strong move toward offshoring activities he noted. And most of these IT professionals are involved in support work not innovation Mott said. more > City prepares to test new trading platform The UK's major banks and hundreds of City trading firms will begin testing the London Stock Exchange's new core trading platform early next month ahead of its planned launch in the summer of 2007. The Tradelect platform is the final part of a four-year IT transformation programme designed to increase capacity cut latency and enable new services to be rolled out more quickly and at lower cost. Testing will focus on speed and systems compatibility. It will involve all the stock exchange's 335 plugged-in broker member companies running conformance tests in dedicated time slots. more > A Joint Assault on the Mainframe Hardware Market Two companies are about to launch a joint assault on IBM's mainframe processor market. Platform Solutions has built a series of large-scale computers that can load and run software written for the System z9 and its antecedents. T3 Technologies will incorporate PSI's technology in a line of midrange IBM-compatible mainframes. While these new processors might not break IBM's grip on the mainframe base they could well inspire IBM to make substantial changes in its mainframe technology. more > Get The Legacy Connection Hummingbird’s Connectivity 2007 Lets Business Users Access Mainframe & Unix Apps Business IT today runs mostly on Windows and x86-based Linux servers. But many companies still have Unix midrange IBM AS/400 and other mainframes hosting legacy applications and data which Windows users want to be able to access. And many of the files that Windows users want to be able to access are on Linux/Unix systems while many of the resources that Unix systems and network-attached NFS machines want are on Windows environments. more > Munich Re replaces legacy systems with new IT platform German reinsurer Munich Re is launching a new IT platform to replace 17 legacy systems for electronic data management. In launching the Gloria (Global Reinsurance Application) platform Munich Re plans to standardize business processes and the handling of reinsurance business as well as improve the quality and efficiency of activities such as underwriting claims management and accounting. Munich Re says that the provision of a uniform database increases the efficiency of the analysis control and administration of all reinsurance business. The harmonization of core business processes also supports the firm's global risk management. We will be able to process our information even more efficiently and to significantly streamline internal analytical processes said Dr Torsten Jeworrek the board member responsible for the Gloria project. Increased data transparency will help us obtain risk adequate prices and conditions. more > Linking Cobol to SOA made easier Leveraging legacy applications in modern environments such as SOA remains an ongoing issue for enterprises. To help with this transition BluePhoenix Solutions on September 18 is announcing the release of a platform to redevelop legacy Cobol applications for use in environments such as SOA Java and C#. Called BluePhoenix Redevelopment the product set features a toolset methodology and services. It is to be showcased at the Gartner Application Development Summit in Phoenix beginning September 25. The company cited Temenos a Swiss-based provider of integrated core banking systems as a user. Temenos used the platform to move Cobol applications to Java. more > BearingPoint hooks North Carolina HR and payroll deal The state of North Carolina has tapped BearingPoint Inc. to implement a new human resources and payroll system that will replace antiquated computer systems. Under the two-year $28 million contract BearingPoint of McLean Va. will serve as project manager and implement the new system which is powered by mySAP enterprise resource planning software from SAP Public Services Inc. The system is intended to help more than 80 000 Tar Heel state employees make better and faster decisions about their careers and employment benefits. By consolidating multiple legacy systems automating manual processes and eliminating most paper forms BearingPoint will create a single system of record that will enable more accurate and efficient reporting and decision making by North Carolina employees. more > Mainframe programming and open source -- Where's the beef? It is now 22 years since a fast-food concern showed a crusty old lady peering between a burger's buns and asking where's the beef? And as new approaches such as open source continue to arrive we continue to ask where's the real-world value? Open-source advocates often cite lower software prices power to the masses or avoidance of vendor lock-in. However a key value of open source is the ability of IT shops to tap into open source development and its methodologies to enhance applications. Open source and collaborative programming not only leverage programming power outside the enterprise or overseas but also improve the quality of in-house proprietary programming making not only business-critical applications but entire platforms much more effective. The mainframe vendors and mainframe IT have appeared least visible in their efforts to use open source for development purposes. more > Financial services: High pressure performance When it comes to sheer IT bling financial services is never outshone. High margins deep pockets and intense competition in investment banking and insurance have pushed these companies to the edge of just about any technology there is. Storage grid technology Web services virtualization VOIP -- you name it financial services companies have bought it. But firms in the financial services sector are driven by more than profit and time to market. Stringent regulations and governance requirements in the securities and banking sectors have raised compliance to the top of the stack. The result is a two-edged sword: millisecond performance and rapid development to compete in a cutthroat market while zealous regulators hover in search of mistakes. more > Western Australia Police enforces content management Western Australia Police has contracted vendor Objective to implement an electronic content management (ECM) system that will be used by more than 6 000 staff. The rollout will initially seek to replace file registration and tracking functionality which is currently performed on a number of legacy mainframe systems according to a statement sent by Objective to the Australian Stock Exchange this morning. This will provide the basis for a fuller ECM program. In the statement WA Police superintendent Nigel White said the eventual decommissioning of mainframes had been identified as a corporate priority and would assist the organisation in upgrading to more user-friendly information systems. more > Software cos make it big in products too Often criticised for their services-skew and lack of product revenues Indian software companies are now making a mark globally with their core banking products. Apart from I-flex Solutions acquired by the world's second largest software firm Oracle for its Flexcube suite of products Infosys Technologies India's second largest software firm is also making its presence felt in the core-banking products space. The Indian vendors have been identified as the top performers in a recent analysis of core banking systems by the US-based research firm Celent. more > FBI Prepares For Phase One Of Controversial Sentinel Program The first big test of the FBI's latest effort to create a more cohesive data-sharing infrastructure comes next month when the bureau will formally scrutinize plans for its highly anticipated Sentinel project and the project's lead contractor Lockheed Martin. After that review the FBI will decide whether Lockheed will move ahead with the more than $400 million application modernization project. This is a make-or-break moment for CIO Zalmai Azmi. The FBI's last major application upgrade the $170 million Virtual Case File system was a highly publicized failure. So Congress the Justice Department and the public are watching Sentinel closely. I'm looking for my engineers to come back to me to tell me the design of the project is sound says Azmi who has 75 people including FBI staff and contractors working on the project. I'm not worried about this but I am anxious to move into the building phase. Sentinel is a political hot potato so it gets a lot of attention. more > FBI Prepares For Phase One Of Controversial Sentinel Program The first big test of the FBI's latest effort to create a more cohesive data-sharing infrastructure comes next month when the bureau will formally scrutinize plans for its highly anticipated Sentinel project and the project's lead contractor Lockheed Martin. After that review the FBI will decide whether Lockheed will move ahead with the more than $400 million application modernization project. This is a make-or-break moment for CIO Zalmai Azmi. The FBI's last major application upgrade the $170 million Virtual Case File system was a highly publicized failure. So Congress the Justice Department and the public are watching Sentinel closely. I'm looking for my engineers to come back to me to tell me the design of the project is sound says Azmi who has 75 people including FBI staff and contractors working on the project. I'm not worried about this but I am anxious to move into the building phase. Sentinel is a political hot potato so it gets a lot of attention. more > Software AG Enhances ApplinX Legacy Modernization Tool Software AG released version 5.1 of its ApplinX legacy modernization tool which the company says will transform green-screen terminal applications on mainframe and iSeries platforms into Web-accessible modern interfaces with no additional coding... Knowing that legacy modernization is never a scenario where one-size-fits- all ” says Joe Gentry vice president of business line enterprise transaction systems Software AG “ApplinX provides the flexibility for application workflow optimisation Web enablement and service enablement.” more > Software AG Enhances ApplinX Legacy Modernization Tool Software AG released version 5.1 of its ApplinX legacy modernization tool which the company says will transform green-screen terminal applications on mainframe and iSeries platforms into Web-accessible modern interfaces with no additional coding... Knowing that legacy modernization is never a scenario where one-size-fits- all ” says Joe Gentry vice president of business line enterprise transaction systems Software AG “ApplinX provides the flexibility for application workflow optimisation Web enablement and service enablement.” more > Success Stories from the Age of Legacy Integration It’s a challenge to bring the mainframe into the modern age of service-oriented architecture but there’s a huge payoff once the job is done. When Applications Manager Roger Lanka of FirstMerit Bank and his client/server development team opted for DataDirect’s Shadow zServices they were simply looking to speed response times on their customer site. Shadow zServices provides a bi-directional channel between mainframe data and Web services so developers are able work from mainframe screens in the languages they’re already familiar with. more > Big Blue ready for mainframe battle We're going to spend a bunch of money IBM has plans in place to spend tens of millions of dollars to coax new customers to buy the company's mainframes. The money will be spent in the next couple years on tasks such as training customers tuning their software for mainframes and helping them migrate computing infrastructure said Jim Stallings who in January took over as head of the mainframe group. When you have a mainframe in your infrastructure you understand its attributes. If you haven't been exposed to that it's very different Stallings said. We're going to spend a bunch of money helping them. more > Legacy replacements drive supply chain software market Worldwide supply chain management software revenues will reach $2.5bn (£1.3bn) in manufacturing industry alone by 2010 according to a new study by industry analyst Datamonitor. Last year revenues in the sector reached $1.6bn. Datamonitor said the growth would be driven by both SME and larger manufacturers as they looked either to replace legacy systems or to implement a supply chain management system from scratch. more > New tech take up too slow says NCC The National Computing Centre has warned that lack of investment in IT lack of boardroom involvement and reliance on legacy systems are hampering business development. NCC chief executive Michael Gough cited a survey for the organisation’s recent Benchmark of IT Strategy 2006 report which found that 50% of IT decision makers felt the adoption of new technology was too slow and could have a serious impact on business competitiveness. Gough said that the IT budgets of many organisations “have not changed in the last three years” which meant less money was available in real terms to fund business change initiatives. more > Thoughts on mainframes and SOA Spent a day at IBM’s Z series industry analyst event a few weeks ago. This was long overdue as being an “open systems” man (as the Z groupies say) the mainframe to me has generally meant little more than a box on a PowerPoint slide labelled “legacy systems” typically with a picture of some kind of gateway in front of it to make all of that closed proprietary stuff available to the “real” world. Amazing how the old timers in the mainframe world often have completely the opposite mindset-the mainframe is the “real” environment and everything else-all that Windows and Unix stuff -is just playing. - more > Clerity to Revive Mainframe Rehosting after Acquiring Sun Tools Clerity Solutions has a 15-year history of providing porting services and tools from obscure computing systems to more modern computers. But by acquiring a set of mainframe application porting and rehosting tools from Sun Microsystemswhich the company quietly did at the end of June Clerity is now a relatively big player at many mainframe shops. Clerity which is based in the Chicago suburb of Oakbrook Terrace has been doing ports of old Wang word processing systems and HP 3000 MPE-based minicomputers to other platforms and had approximately 25 employees before buying Sun's Mainframe Transaction Processing (MTP) and Mainframe Batch Manager (MBM) systems software and middleware for an undisclosed sum. more > Is Mainframe SOA all hype? Service-oriented architecture (SOA) was a major focus of this year's Share conference in Baltimore. But what does SOA mean to the mainframe community? In interviews with more than a half-dozen users at the conference not one had implemented an SOA environment in their data centers. Some were planning out how to use their mainframe in the architecture while others have only spoken of it generally in the office and have no specific plans. more > Modernizing Legacy Mainframe Apps Saves Dev Time Money By modernizing instead of replacing legacy mainframe apps Tulsa County in Oklahoma improved access to county property records and legal documents and saved an estimated $300 000. However cost-savings was only one element: Using Software AG’s ApplinX improved customer relations and cut development time. “It has greatly enhanced the experience of the public in dealing with obtaining information from our local government without requiring an expensive and total rewrite of existing mainframe applications ” says Tom Trimble MIS director of Tulsa County. “ApplinX was very intuitive and permitted our small staff to provide a fast and usable solution to meet the evolving needs of the taxpayers without the timeline and cost of typical new application development.” Tulsa County built a front-end interface between its mainframe land records and document imaging/open systems data to create what Trimble calls “a user-friendly Web application that streamlines multiple applications in multiple environments into a workflow that is very easy to use.” more > Company to retire legacy systems for one integrated one Beall's Inc. helped SAP AG in its effort to expand its business in the retail market by agreeing last week to purchase the integrated SAP for Retail application. The Bradenton Fla.-based retailer which has 600 department and outlet stores and $1.2 billion in annual revenue plans to replace several aging packaged and homegrown systems with the SAP software. Joe Iannello vice president and CIO declined to disclose the value of the contract with SAP except to call it a multimillion-dollar deal. Beall's will start rolling out SAP for Retail in September he said. more > Keeping IT simple Servers are going for (comparatively) cheap prices these days making it much easier for companies to buy one when needed. As a result many organisations have developed a habit of buying a new server each time they plan to install another enterprise application for their organisation and dedicate a server to a single application. Some even purchase servers for each of the key departments within their organisation. Hence you will see companies that have separate accounting servers marketing servers engineering servers and so on. Because of that many enterprises get what the industry calls server sprawl. It is a situation where companies end up owning multiple under-utilised servers which take up more space and consume more resources than can be justified. more > The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't $170 Million Bought an Unusable Computer System As far as Zalmai Azmi was concerned the FBI's technological revolution was only weeks away. It was late 2003 and a contractor Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) had spent months writing 730 000 lines of computer code for the Virtual Case File (VCF) a networked system for tracking criminal cases that was designed to replace the bureau's antiquated paper files and finally shove J. Edgar Hoover's FBI into the 21st century. It appeared to work beautifully. Until Azmi now the FBI's technology chief asked about the error rate. more > Zurich Banking to replace core legacy systems with Finacle across UK Ireland and the Isle of Man Infosys Technologies (NASDAQ:INFY) today announced that Zurich Financial Services one of the leading financial services organisations in Europe is implementing Finacle Universal Banking Solution. The Zurich Banking Business Unit is replacing its existing legacy systems with Finacle core banking and CRM solutions and standardising its processes and systems across its three banking brands - Zurich Bank Dunbar Bank and Zurich Bank International. Zurich Banking is the latest in a series of client wins that Infosys has announced recently. In the last 12 months seven banks across EMEA have chosen to replace their legacy platforms with Finacle to remove complexities and reduce costs. more > IBM To Buy MRO Software For $740 Million IBM the world's largest technology services company said Thursday it agreed to buy MRO Software Inc. for $740 million in cash to expand its business of helping companies manage computer systems and equipment. International Business Machines Corp. said it would pay $25.80 per share for MRO a 19 percent premium on MRO's Wednesday closing price on Nasdaq. more > IBM acquires SOA vendor Webify Solutions IBM has bought services-oriented architecture (SOA) vendor Webify Solutions Inc. and plans to make it a part of IBM's Software Group and WebSphere middleware product family. The move is designed to give IBM customers new options to more easily integrate existing specialized applications using SOA. In an announcement today IBM said it acquired the Austin-based company because Webify's SOA products for the insurance and health care industries will help IBM expand into other markets. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Before the acquisition Webify was an IBM partner in providing SOA services. more > Mainframe plays key role in information on demand Ten years ago the idea of a computing utility that would dispense information on demand first began to be bruited; and today it is beginning to be implemented in the real world. The key value-add from such a utility compared to today's fragmented applications and data stores is not only IT cost-effectiveness but also and more importantly full access by the business to the right bit of information or the right change in information immediately. This kind of real-time information access translates not only to better decision-making but also to comparative advantage by identifying key proprietary data that allows the enterprise to create and maintain better relationships with customers and suppliers -- and because that data is proprietary competitors cannot imitate it. more > Clothing retailer dresses up IT systems Clothing retailer Peacocks has implemented a real-time data integration platform to enable it to access greater amounts of data faster and boost operational efficiency. It has deployed the software at its data resource and reporting system at its IT and distribution headquarters in Cardiff to maximise its business intelligence. Its data resource and reporting system helps the retailer to manage logistics finance merchandising buying and stock distribution operations. Peacocks operations and development manager Mark Webbley said: ‘We needed a data integration product that enabled us to access data and bridge legacy systems to give us better information and help make the business run more smoothly. ‘After testing a number of products we selected Attunity Connect to provide the link between our new Windows-based applications and existing legacy systems and data.’ more > Readying mainframes for SOA not so simple? Just how easy is it for developers to prepare mainframe apps for service-oriented architectures? Well the answer to that is all relative. Vendors are quick to tout SOA simplicity but some warn the process often brings unforeseen strain to IT environments. “People sometimes get a naïve and unrealistic view that this is something very very simple ” said Mike Oara CTO of Relativity Technologies. “The sooner people know about the difficulty of the task the better it is for them.” Raleigh N.C.-based Relativity specializes in the enterprise app modernization process aiming to increase the flexibility of apps and exploit their value. According to Oara the group achieves this by identifying hidden architectural traps a process he calls “pre-enablement.” This process is essentially a review of in-house legacy and mainframe apps that exposes functionality pinpoints traps provides solutions and creates definitions for services. more > AlwaysOn: U.S. lags China and Europe in new technology adoption Bob Suh chief technology strategist at Accenture doesn't believe the U.S. has an innovation problem. We have an adoption problem in the U.S. Suh said. Speaking at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit Suh shared Accenture's recent survey of CIOs which showed that the U.S. is falling behind China and Europe with regard to investing in new technology. China and some European companies are leapfrogging the U.S. with SOA and Web services he said. U.S. companies are making safe bets wrapping and fortifying legacy systems rather than building fresh systems from the ground up. Nobody gets fired for window dressing a legacy system but they get fired for technology project failures Suh explained. U.S. CIOs are more prone to think about 18 to 24 month development ordeals hundreds of people dedicated to a project and millions of dollars rather than plowing new ground with SOA and Web services that is ultimately less painful or intrusive. more > From point A to Z —and back again A business process is not a single application but rather a flow of tasks and often documents that typically involves many individuals departments and enterprises. Even if automated the process probably taps into many databases and programs which is why it can be so prone to the errors and inefficiencies that come from poor coordination communication and data integration. As a process-intensive industry government is keen on the latest generation of business process management software. Case in point the Marine Corps which replaced a fragmented paper-intensive legacy procurement system with a solution from Appian Corp. Acting as a sort of centralized Web-based layer of logic atop legacy applications Appian Procurement connects administrators internal customers and contractors plus their systems and processes while enforcing new policies. The result according to the Marines was $9 million in first-year savings. more > m2o Heals HBA Health Insurance with Business Application Migration MOVE2OPEN (m2o) a leading provider of data migration and application conversion solutions announces the successful business application migration of HBA Health Insurance. HBA Health Insurance has made annual savings of $2 million by migrating its business applications from an expensive mainframe system to a lower-cost UNIX platform using tools from leading legacy migration software provider m2o. Business Applications migration allows HBA to make annual savings of $2 million By migrating its legacy assets HBA is now ready to take advantage of a modernised Web services infrastructure to improve customer service levels and further reduce IT costs explain Huw Price Managing Director of m2o. With more than a million members HBA is one of Australia's major health insurers and part of worldwide health and care company BUPA. When BUPA acquired HBA in 2003 it separated all key systems from its previous owner (AXA) to establish its own computer functions and IT services in Melbourne. The final transfer was the migration of BOSS - the core administration and service system of the business - from a mainframe located in New York to a UNIX Sun Solaris system in Australia. more > Innovation revolution on the horizon Businesses around the world need to work more closely with their peers to keep abreast of challenging research and development schedules according to analyst Forrester Research The company says there is an increasingly compelling need for businesses to share insights and different perspectives on new technologies to cope with rapid changes in customer demand and to reduce failures. IBM takes the issue so seriously that it has formed a technology innovation collaboration group so that other companies can work with it and gain access to its technical expertise and knowledge when developing new systems and equipment. Computing met IBM systems and technology group executive Bill Zeitler to discuss the impact that such collaboration will have on innovation. more > IBM upbeat in spite of slowdown IBM on Tuesday blamed poor execution in parts of its business and signs of a slowdown in demand from large enterprise customers for a negligible 1 per cent underlying growth in its revenues in the latest quarter. But the US technology giant hit earnings forecasts as it continued to reap benefits from its recent productivity improvements prompting its shares in after-market trading to regain some of its recent losses. more > IBM upbeat in spite of slowdown IBM on Tuesday blamed poor execution in parts of its business and signs of a slowdown in demand from large enterprise customers for a negligible 1 per cent underlying growth in its revenues in the latest quarter. But the US technology giant hit earnings forecasts as it continued to reap benefits from its recent productivity improvements prompting its shares in after-market trading to regain some of its recent losses. more > JM Family Enterprises Selects BluePhoenix for Major Modernization Project of its Vehicle Distributio BluePhoenix Solutions the leader in Enterprise IT Modernization announced today that it has been selected by Southeast Toyota Distributors LLC (SET) and its parent company JM Family Enterprises Inc. (JMFE) ranked by Forbes as the 17th largest privately held company in the United States to modernize the company's vehicle distribution system. With over $9.4 billion in annual revenues Deerfield Beach Florida-based JM Family Enterprises' principal businesses focus on vehicle distribution and processing automotive finance and insurance products and services and dealer technology products and services. more > When Failure Is not an Option Five years ago almost half of AG Edwards's IT projects were late and over budget. Now it boasts an 88 percent project success rate. How did it do that? By galvanizing IT reinventing its PMO and relying on a standard framework to track projects and create accountability. more > CIOs lacking in IQ: Deloitte The explosion of data and reporting requirements have prompted over two-thirds of large companies in Australia and NZ to hike up their IT spend and improve their company’s 'information quality' or IQ according to a Deloitte research. In a survey exploring the link between the IT systems of a company and its business performance Deloitte found that many chief information officers (CIOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) in Australia and NZ admitted that their IT systems were inadequate. More than 32 per cent of respondents cited disparate non-integrated IT systems and variable business processes are ‘acute problems’. “The majority of decision makers said they felt they did not have ready access to reliable and quality information on operational and financial performance ” said Kurt Proctor-Parker Deloitte’s CIO Services partner. more > Combined Solutions Enable Customers to Speed Implementation of Service-Oriented Architectures to Red NetManage Inc. a software company that provides solutions for integrating Web enabling and accessing enterprise information systems and Cape Clear Software a provider of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) solutions to enable service-oriented architecture (SOA) today announced a strategic partnership. The partnership will provide customers with a streamlined yet comprehensive path to a SOA via the integration of complementary solutions. The combination of NetManage and Cape Clear solutions will help enterprises leverage existing applications stored on legacy and mainframe systems and incorporate them into a broader SOA. Through the partnership the companies will jointly promote and deliver services and support as well as coordinate sales efforts. more > CIOS IN THE DARK OVER MAINTENANCE COST CREEP CIOs are clueless when it comes to understanding their application maintenance costs. But it's not ignorance that prevents them from taking control of skyrocketing expenses. It's the lack of visibility. Ever-expanding maintenance budgets have tied the hands of CIOs who would rather send money to new projects that add value to their businesses. A little visibility into how those maintenance dollars are spent might loosen the knots. CIOs can't manage what they can't see said Phil Murphy principal analyst at Cambridge Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. Murphy said decades of growing IT environments have left CIOs with a murky view of how to spend their maintenance dollars. more > Banking on success The banking sector has always included some of the IT industry’s most voracious technology consumers. Banks will continue to spend billions of dollars over the next few years in an effort to beef up ageing core banking systems and guarantee compliance with new legislation. Worldwide industry analysts predict IT spending in the financial services industry will rise to nearly US$410 billion by 2008. Banks in the Middle East are reflecting such spending behaviour with the lion’s share of budgets going to compliance projects security and improvement of business processes. more > Special Report: BPM inside the belly of the SOA whale part 2 Today's organizations are striving to be more agile to better respond to change and new opportunity. Process improvement and innovation will be key to doing so. However according to a recent survey conducted by the BPM Forum and webMethods Inc. only about one-third of respondents are satisfied with their company's ability to respond to change. The survey found that the biggest obstacle to modifying core business processes is a lack of functional integration followed by human factors cultural resistance and incompatible legacy systems. Most companies have growth as a number one priority both through revenue and market increases. What is going to drive this growth is a new business model said Ashish Mohindroo senior product director for Oracle Fusion Middleware at Oracle Corp. Companies are introducing and defining new business processes and most of these guys are looking at IT and business process management [BPM] to shorten the gap from strategy to execution. They want new business models implemented as soon as possible. That's where BPM becomes more critical. We see a tremendous uptake in the need for a BPM platform. more > Microsoft Acquires Apptimum Microsoft aims to use Apptimum's technology to ease the process of moving applications and settings from older Windows desktops to the Vista upgrade.Microsoft has application migration features built into Windows Vista but is buying an ISV's tool to ensure a smooth upgrade cycle for customers. Microsoft said Tuesday it plans to acquire Apptimum the Sunrise Fla.-based maker of Alohobob PC relocation software and the Migrate DT user state management engine. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Microsoft has improved the computer setup process in Vista and aims to use Apptimum's technology to ease the process of moving applications and settings from older Windows desktops to the Vista upgrade which is due for release late this year. A Microsoft-branded product based on the Apptimum technology is slated to be available as an optional download for Vista the Redmond Wash.-based software giant said. Future plans for the Apptimum product weren’t revealed. Microsoft also didn’t specify the release date for the download or other products. more > Technology gets SOA much better for Ontario government Transforming a puzzling patchwork of disjointed legacy applications to an integrated yet flexible suite may seem a daunting task.But it's a goal the Ontario government is well on its way to achieving thanks to its new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiative. SOA is a software architectural concept that defines the use of services to support the requirements of software users. Stressing virtues of interoperability and reusability SOA promises greater flexibility and responsiveness in data systems and the business processes they support.In Ontario the new SOA framework will reuse systems for common business processes and make the government's IT infrastructure more flexible to adapt to changes in government programs and even changes in governments.Ron Huxter chief technology officer in Ontario's Ministry of Government Services used an IBM Canada breakfast on SOA best practices in Toronto last month to outline the government's blueprint. He said one key driver for moving to SOA was the need to be more agile. We have 200 to 300 different lines of business … of which one-third to one-half get whipped-out every four years. more > GT Software Makes SOA Available for the Mainframe: Ivory Service Architect Enables The Mainframe To GT Software announced the availability of its service-oriented architecture (SOA) development tools for the mainframe called Ivory Service Architect. The software development tools enable organizations to use their existing mainframe hardware applications data and skills to rapidly proliferate mainframe-based business services through their service-oriented architectures. The Gtsoftware tools enable Mainframe developers to graphically orchestrate mainframe transactions applications data and web services into multi-step multi-operation business services with no formal training and no consulting required. Ivory Service Architect includes two key components - Ivory Studio and Ivory Server. These components work in tandem to enable mainframe developers to create right-sized business services. more > Intel Faces Its Future at Forum Intel might have hoped its spring Developer Forum which arrives next week would be all about the chips. However a March 3 first quarter profit warning by the company which comes after it missed its fourth quarter 2004 earnings expectations could darken the doorstep of the event which kicks off on March 7 at San Francisco's Moscone Center West. Intel said March 3 that its first quarter revenue would total between $8.7 billion and $9.1 billion versus its prior guidance of between $9.1 billion and $9.7 billion. It cited weaker-than-expected demand and a slight market-share loss for the lower revenue. Likely the lower demand stems from inventory build-ups at PC makers which Intel said bought aggressively in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile Advanced Micro Devices which gained market-share across the board during the fourth quarter—AMD's share rose almost four points to 21.4 percent while Intel's slipped about the same to 76.9 percent Mercury Research numbers show—could be seeing more of the same analysts said. more > The Need for Power Sparks Itanium Solutions Alliance: Intel licensees pool resources to simplify mig March 1 2006 Category: Nine companies last month agreed to pony up cash and resources through 2010 to promote Intel’s Itanium 2 platform as a superior alternative to IBM’s Power and Sun’s SPARC chips both of which are RISC-based. The companies have formed the Itanium Solutions Alliance—Intel plus eight of its licensees—and met in January to discuss ways of bringing more organizations to Itanium. According to IDC about US$140 billion will be spent on computer systems between now and 2010 as corporations continue to update computing capabilities and advance to 64-bit platforms. About half of that is earmarked for mission-critical systems IDC data showed. And for those systems “companies don’t want to get locked into a vendor ” asserted Mike Mitsch director of alliances for NEC referring to system and application migration. “They want to be able to move amongst other vendors.” The Japanese computer giant manufactures RISC- and non-RISC-based systems. more > Software AG Launches Natural Business Services as First Natural 2006 Software AG today announced a new service-oriented development environment for its Natural application development platform as the first Natural 2006 product portfolio release. Natural Business Services is currently the only full-lifecycle service development and runtime environment to operate natively on multiple mainframe platforms. Natural Business Services enables developers to use modeling technology to create new service-oriented business functions that can take advantage of the proven transactional capabilities of the mainframe. By hiding the complexity of the mainframe Natural application developers can provide enterprise-scale services for a Java .NET or SOA environment much easier and faster. more > IBM: Taking the Risk out of Migration One issue that any organization will eventually face is the need for refresh of aging technology. While a system may have represented the state of the art when it was installed over time any solution begins to lose its cost-effectiveness. Although many believe refreshing technology is as simple as calling the vendor who provided the solution a company should consider whether the original supplier necessarily has the best solution today. Whether the purchase is for a refresh of an out-of-date system with high maintenance costs or for an upgrade to address operational limitations customers should carefully weigh the risk in staying with a given vendor or migrating to another. In many cases a refresh is an opportune time at which to consider the value proposition of a platform migration and to evaluate which vendor could best meet the customer’s current needs. more > Merrill Lynch & Co.: Living Legacy Jim Crew could be considered an All-Star in the fledgling field of service oriented architecture. Over the past four years Crew as the former head of database infrastructure at Wall Street brokerage Merrill Lynch & Co. had spearheaded an effort to modernize the firm's multibillion-dollar investment in mainframe technology by building a platform to easily integrate many of the company's decades-old legacy applications with new software. Since 2001 his team has helped generate as many as 420 Web services—essentially using a collection of Internet technologies like eXtenstible Markup Language (XML) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to make operations currently performed on the mainframe available to programmers creating new applications in modern environments such as Sun Microsystems' Java or Microsoft's .NET. In the process he has helped Merrill Lynch save as much as $42 million in application development by being able to leverage business-hardened code on the mainframe and by making new hardware purchases unnecessary. In getting information directly from the mainframe and reusing existing legacy applications Merrill has avoided having to copy information to more modern database platforms like Oracle and Sybase or rewriting software to run on application servers. more > Preserving our digital heritage The British Library is on a mission to digitise its immense collection of books and manuscripts. It is a challenge of mind-boggling proportions. The British Library whose reading rooms have been frequented by the likes of Karl Marx Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf is on a very modern mission. Its aim is to preserve the UK's digital heritage as well as continue its stewardship of physical tomes. But the rapid obsolescence of software publishing formats could make this task more challenging than preserving the Domesday Book. One of the world's great treasure troves the library houses 13 million books seven million manuscripts and 4.5 million maps as well as 3.5 million sound recordings eight million stamps and 58 million newspapers in various formats. Although most of its content is ink on paper Roger Butcher programme manager for the Integrated Library System says The future is without doubt digital. Reducing cost was a big driver for the upgrade. Legacy applications were in a gamut of languages from Assembler to Cobol and were very expensive to maintain as some were over 30 years old. more > VC Deal Signals Turbulence Ahead For Airlines' Legacy IT The whopping $100 million in venture funding that ITA Software won last week may be the most telling indicator yet that sweeping changes are in store for the airline industry and the IT infrastructure the industry has relied on for decades. ITA a developer of airfare pricing and shopping applications has provided a fare-searching service to airlines for six years. Now it's locked onto bigger goals. The company has developed airfare-booking software that lowers processing costs to a few dollars per ticket far below the $12 a ticket airlines pay reservation processors like the Sabre Travel Network. And CEO Jeremy Wertheimer sees opportunities to develop apps to help airlines modernize everything from reservation systems and call centers to gate operations and aircraft maintenance. But buying and selling tickets is the focus for now. Almost every ticket you buy is still being handled by assembler code running on a mainframe Wertheimer says. ITA's applications run on inexpensive x86 PC hardware running Linux. That has caught the attention of major airlines which see a chance to drive down costs and compete with low-cost carriers such as Southwest Airlines. more > Metastorm EPO Ease SAP Integration Metastorm a provider of business-process management (BPM) software and its partner EPO Consulting have developed a new way to connect Metastorm's BPM system to SAP's enterprise software. The increased scale and complexity of our customers' business challenges require that they look for ways to simplify the system-integration requirements of process-management initiatives said Greg Carter chief technology officer and vice president of product development for Metastorm. This announcement represents a new software package in a long line of new tools and technologies that clearly illustrate companies continue to experience pain with interfacing legacy applications to new systems. According to Phil Gilbert CTO at Lombardi Software a provider of BPM software and services BPM vendors are trying to make integration as easy as possible with flexible process technologies that are driving the agility of enterprises even more so than the underlying applications themselves such as SAP. more > IBM Inks $1.1 Billion Outsourcing Deal With Gap The 10-year pact calls for IBM to support and manage mainframes servers networks and data centers as well as provide help-desk and disaster-recovery services. Gap Inc. is turning over the management of its IT infrastructure to IBM under an outsourcing deal worth about $1.1 billion according to a regulatory filing by the casual clothier. Under a 10-year deal disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission document dated Jan. 13 IBM will provide a broad range of technology services to Gap including support and management of mainframes servers networks and data centers. IBM will also provide Gap with help-desk and disaster-recovery services. As part of the deal about 400 Gap workers will transfer to IBM. They may have reason to be nervous. Increasingly at least some amount of corporate IT work that's outsourced to a services vendor ends up offshore after a transition period of several months. The process is seldom acknowledged publicly by either party. Officials at IBM and Gap weren't immediately available for comment. To receive the full value of the contract IBM needs to meet a number of service levels and other conditions according to the SEC filing. Failure to meet the conditions would entitle Gap to receive credit against charges otherwise due withhold certain payments or terminate the agreement. more > Hurricanes Expose Obsolete Software The city of Houston was five months into updating aging procurement asset-management and payroll applications when Mother Nature interfered. At that point many city officials wished the financial-app integration was further along. It would have saved a lot of work going back and setting up documentation of those storm-preparation costs says Earl Lambert citywide chief technology officer. The accounting for these expenses was buried in the city's 1980s-era asset-management software running on a mainframe. Arcane reporting capabilities made it difficult to summon data. Yet the city was required to do so to meet federal emergency-assistance requirements. more > Managing IT Integration Question: You've just been recognized by IDG as one of the Premier 100 IT Leaders largely by virtue of having led the integration of three recently acquired companies. What would you say was the most difficult aspect in merging these IT systems and how did you surmount them? Petrone: The most difficult aspect of merging the various IT systems was not a technical issue but a business one. Integration projects frequently have to compete for resources with new development and run the business maintenance activities and the key challenge for us was managing these competing priorities. We accomplished this by working with the business units to make certain critical integration tasks were at the top of the priority list. Less critical integration tasks were stretched out so that we did not completely shut down new development. In all cases we tried to divide the integration project into small manageable tasks to reduce risk. more > iWay Software Announces Comprehensive SOA Integration Suite iWay Software an Information Builders company and an innovator of enterprise integration solutions today announced iWay SOA Middleware(TM) a comprehensive enterprise integration product suite that enables customers to make their entire IT infrastructure more open more flexible and more easily aligned with business requirements. Leveraging its heritage as the world's leading adapter provider iWay Software is in a unique position to address the fundamental problem of integration -- creating and maintaining service interfaces to disparate systems in technical environments. iWay SOA Middleware will help organizations eliminate the complexity associated with service-oriented architecture deployments and leverage existing IT investments to create powerful reusable business services through the market's most economical integration offering. Forward-thinking organizations including Coty Inc. Novelis and S. Abraham & Sons Inc. are unlocking the potential of SOA for business intelligence supply-chain management procurement compliance and more while fulfilling integration's promise to drive corporate performance to the next level. more > Nortel to dump Oracle solve fiscal woes using SAP Telecom equipment maker Nortel Networks Ltd. is working with SAP to solve its stymied data problems that has plagued the company with fiscal irregularities in recent years. The company plans on eliminating Oracle Corp. for its financial transactions and is installing SAP Master Data Management and streamlining other multiple legacy systems in the process. SAP developed and launched its own set of master data management (MDM) tools in 2002. It abandoned that development when it purchased Los Angeles-based A2i in 2004 and then repackaged A2i's product as its own. MDM provides a framework to define the reference master data within a company. Reference data is a category of data that describes and defines transactions such as a sale of Nortel network equipment or optical system to a particular customer. SAP MDM integrates product data and identifies and cleanses similar data objects across various systems. Companies that use the new application should be able to receive product data from third-party systems and unify it in a common data format. more > Bringing IT Challenges Down to Earth With a growing number of users of an exploding collection of data—originating and residing in heterogeneous systems—NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System Project presents challenges that are recognizable to many enterprise IT builders. Applying the principles of an SOA (service-oriented architecture) and taking advantage of the service discovery capabilities of this year's Version 3 update of the UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) protocol National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its contractors have streamlined data access while also enabling a richer ecosystem of customized applications for analysis and interpretation. As changes in climate polar ice coverage and other environmental parameters become urgent global concerns NASA's SOA modernization is improving earth science understanding and enabling better policy decisions. In the beginning: Chartered in 1990 earth science Data and Information System Project or ESDIS has a broad portfolio whose key tasks include project management systems engineering and technical direction of systems that archive and distribute earth science data along with the definition of high-level standard data products. The roots of the system go back four decades to the United States' first Earth-observing satellites. more > DISA Ready to Issue RFP for Multibillion-Dollar Net-Centric Project The Defense Department will release as early as Monday the request for proposals for converting its legacy systems to the Network Centric Enterprise Services program. Encore II which reportedly could be worth about $10 billion over 10 years for hardware software and services will provide lifecycle support to NCES capabilities and tweak the program's architecture officials have said. In a notice posted today on FedBizOpps.gov the Defense Information Systems Agency said it would post the final solicitation on or about Monday with the expected due date for proposals. DISA said it expects to award the indefinite-delivery indefinite-quantity contracts to vendors by May. DISA issued the draft RFP last December. The Encore II contracts would expand the capabilities of DISA's Defense Enterprise Information Services I and II contracts and earlier Encore contracts. more > Legacy data poses risks Computing reports on events at software firm CA’s annual user conference in Las Vegas. Poor data integration projects could be putting companies at risk of prosecution from regulators says CA’s chief compliance officer Patrick Gnazzo. Speaking during a compliance roundtable at CA World last week Gnazzo said organisations must improve how they manage IT integration projects and ensure that legacy systems are not feeding inaccurate information into reporting tools or exposing customer data. ‘Most big firms have between 200 and 400 legacy systems that have data ’ said Gnazzo. ‘But now this information is being poured into SAP and other systems.’ Companies should audit systems before integration and make sure key data is accurate. ‘If you have a bunch of legacy systems that don’t have the right information in them and it is poured into an enterprise resource planning system then there is a risk that you could be in danger of regulatory prosecution both from a financial and data privacy point of view.’ more > New mainframe emulation option could boost speeds by eight times Users are set to benefit from major changes to the way mainframe emulation software is charged. Until now users who wanted to offload light mainframe workloads could run an IBM xSeries Xeon-based server using FlexES a mainframe emulator from Fundamental Software. Due to restrictions set by IBM emulation speeds were limited to 18mips. But Platform Solutions founded in 1999 by a group of former PSI Amdahl mainframe engineers has developed an alternative approach that could offer users up to eight times the performance of FlexES according to mainframe analyst Phil Payne of Isham Research. Emulators are often deployed by mainframe users during migration projects when they are unable to run legacy applications on newer Unix and Intel-based hardware. Often this occurs when the old mainframe functionality cannot be replicated and so users face the prospect of maintaining the old mainframe system. more > €17m IT spend for government's aid department: Legacy systems to go... Business systems firm Agresso is to lead a €17m project to replace IT systems at the UK's Department for International Development. The poverty-fighting arm of the government which employs more than 1 400 people around the world chose the firm to co-ordinate a number of vendors for the project dubbed Aries. The firm is to replace legacy equipment with financial reporting systems to cut data duplication and speed up response times to parliamentary questions. The applications will be installed on servers in the UK and delivered to the international locations via satellite. more > First Responder Market Sees a Potential for Growth in All Technologies The First Responder market is in the midst of a sea change in terms of adoption rates of new technologies that link legacy systems as well as implement next generation solutions. With public and private initiatives the growth opportunity is enormous for new technologies in the First Responder market. Throughout the last decade the First Responder market has witnessed occasional implementation of new technologies. Post 9/11 a renewed focus has been given to interoperable communications and other technologies that sync agencies and hospitals as well as increase the efficiency productivity and communications capabilities of the First Responders. Though accessibility can prove difficult at times a thrust of federal state and local funding as well as organizational mandates are driving new growth in all types of technologies from communications and monitoring devices to various other software and hardware systems. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan U.S. Markets for First Responders reveals the niche market for Field Data Collection software to be approximately $52.5 million in 2004 and is expected to reach $105.0 million in 2009. more > Banks face legacy IT skills gap crisis Who will keep banks' ageing systems running as the experts retire? Lorries still cart magnetic tape around the city after a hard day's banking. Even in this age of high speed networks some institutions still insist on getting their data in this way.Chris Dunn business development manager at payments company Voca said: It sounds amazing but the settlement we give to the Bank of England is on physical media. The banks are keen to retire [tape] because it's not produced any more. We would much rather not heft these things around on tape. And it's not just the tape that's old - banks continue to rely on technologies installed 30 years ago - but the number of IT workers with the skills to keep them running are declining.Dunn said: The biggest barrier is 'if it's working why should we get rid of it'. You've got to look at the cost and the reliability in the long term. Voca is currently trying to move away from legacy systems with its Bacstel-IP programme. Dunn said the pressures of European markets pushed Voca to adopting a new model. The project is costing around £100m.He added: You have to have a really good reason to move. It's only when you get to the other side and you've managed the risk you can breathe a sigh of relief. These things are rarely cheap. more > Curam 'will make huge difference' The Social Development Ministry is increasingly confident that client management software supplied by Irish firm Curam will streamline its bureaucracy and help reduce its reliance on expensive mainframe technology. The investment in the client management system is a precursor to the ministry making a second attempt at ditching its core legacy Swiftt computer application - an endeavour that is expected to cost between $87 million and $180 million. Chief information officer Tim Occleshaw says the ministry and contractor Hewlett-Packard have just begun a proof of concept trial to test the client management system. The trial will run till February three months later than first planned. The delay was the result of the ministry's decision to first establish the price for a full-scale introduction of the software he says. Mr Occleshaw says these negotiations were complex involving Hewlett-Packard in Singapore and the United States as well as lawyers in New Zealand and Ireland. We decided it would be sensible to complete the negotiations for the entire roll-out in advance. There are pros and cons either way but you probably have in some ways more leverage to get a better deal if you agree it all up front. more > Extending Investments in Systems and Staff A radical change in the relationship between technology and business has taken place in the past two years -- a change that promises to multiply the competitiveness and performance of companies that embrace it. Integration is the essence of this transformation: the insistence on integration of IT capabilities with business objectives. As they struggle to keep pace with the requirements of the business IT departments find that their legacy systems are continuously losing relevance. Needs change constantly and the systems do not adapt; the gap grows wider every day. The needs of business are outstripping the ability of IT departments to serve them -- and as a result the requirements of competition often outpace the ability of firms to respond. more > Finding mainframe skills you never knew about Recently IBM announced it would formally help companies figure out how many of their employees are on the verge of retirement and how those retirements would affect organizations. IBM also plans to use cultural anthropologists to try to glean the connections and hidden knowledge from aging workers before that intangible knowledge is lost forever. Big Blue launched the service last month just before the oldest baby boomers turn 60 in January 2006. And in the IT world no group of workers is closer to retirement age on average than mainframe pros. In fact IBM has been extremely proactive in promoting mainframe education to younger IT generation. But what are some of the intangibles that IT courses can't teach? What's a cultural anthropologist going to turn up that a COBOL course can't? more > Dispelling the myths of mainframe integration How can organisations can unlock their existing business assets? Andy Gutteridge vice president of EMEA operations at NEON Systems UK considers the challenge of mainframe integration by adopting Service Oriented and Web Services Architectures. Here Be Dragons: Planning a mainframe integration project can sometimes feel a little like organising a family excursion on a bank holiday weekend. It seems like a good idea until you check the weekend travel and weather forecast: 'major engineering works are expected to cause long delays on all routes with the likelihood of severe weather making driving conditions hazardous. Don't travel unless your journey is absolutely necessary'. more > The new IBM mainframe: bigger better cooler A little over a week ago IBM unveiled the next generation of its mainframe technology the System Z9. The new mainframe represents a quantum leap in performance and scalability - delivering nearly double the MIPS (millions of instructions per second) of its predecessor 80% more bandwidth double the number of partitions and double the memory capacity.Comment: This announcement delivers a significant change to the economics of running mainframe hardware that brings a new lease of life to a platform that is older than most people working in the IT industry today. The launch of the System Z9 - coupled with a renewed Systems Agenda that focuses on Virtualisation Openness and Collaboration - demonstrates that the IBM mainframe is very much alive among the fortune 5000 customer base. more > Old policies threaten super MANDATORY superannuation contributions and a strong share market have let the good times roll for the Australian funds industry but new research concludes that a proliferation of legacy products and a lack of proactive risk management will threaten growth. Yet super choice may well prove a boon for the retail funds industry with a bold prediction that it will result in more employees opting out of low-cost industry super funds. According to the annual PriceWaterhouseCoopers Investment Management Survey the industry continues to grow strongly with assets under management rising 15 to 18 per cent in the current year. The expectation is that it will continue - half the Australian investment managers surveyed expect to enjoy growth in assets under management of 20 per cent-plus in three years' time. more > Fear Factors: What’s keeping CIOs awake at night As information technology constantly evolves so does the role of the CIO who is faced with new challenges and dilemmas to maintain a position at the cutting edge. Better Safe than Sorry: Unsurprisingly security is on the high agenda. Protecting an organization from infiltration is constantly on the minds of the CIO and his or her staff. Bill SChlough of the San Francisco Giants baseball team says that security threats and the continuing growth and proliferation of that threat is his biggest concern. more > St Helens MBC cuts its annual IT costs by 300K St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council has moved from mainframe to Windows and UNIX to reduce costs. Micro Focus and MigrationWare migrated critical legacy applications from proprietary mainframe environments to the Microsoft Windows platform. St. Helens Council has realised the benefits of moving off the mainframe with an immediate £300 000 reduction in annual hardware and software costs. St. Helens decided to move critical financial Accounts Payable and General Ledger applications to Windows for two primary reasons. Firstly the council had adopted Lotus Domino as a key component of their strategic IT platform and second the Council's Information Computing Technology (ICT) team had concluded that the mainframe environment would not provide a suitable long-term future for hosting a Domino-based architecture or meet the needs of the Council's long-term IT objectives more > Behind The Numbers: Closing The Gap Between Objectives And Results Follow don't lead appears to be the mantra of some CIOs when faced with pioneering IT developments according to a survey of CIOs at 310 large companies that was conducted by global management consulting and technology services provider Accenture. Fifty-five percent of the respondents say they prefer to sit back and wait while others absorb the costs and take the risks associated with emerging technologies. Using IT to achieve more with less also is proving to be a challenge as survey respondents struggle to close the gap between company goals and results. Accenture refers to this disconnect as an austerity trap. Companies believe they can freeze or even cut IT budgets while maintaining the same level of service. The upshot: Businesses retain outmoded legacy systems instead of deploying new technologies leading to higher maintenance costs and lost productivity as they focus on IT upkeep repairs and other unproductive practices instead of innovation. more > Big Blue's big box value proposition IBM's largest capacity mainframe to date packs 18 billion transistors into one system which is equivalent to three transistors for every person on the planet but what is going to make IT pros buy it? The likely answer is new security functionalities as well as cost effectiveness. IBM is hoping companies give new importance to encrypting data given recent high profile data breaches. When you talk security you need support in the system. This system has the hardest encryption in the market said Erich Clementi general manager IBM Systems and Technology Group at the z9 launch this week. All long-term data must be encrypted. Tapes must be encrypted from the time they leave the facility to decryption. more > IBM Touts Security Of New Mainframe International Business Machines Corp. introduced a new version of its flagship mainframe computer touting advanced security features for the protection of personal data stored by giant corporate machines. At the same time Big Blue beefed up the machine's power and laid out a strategy to position it at the hub of corporate computing. That strategy leans heavily on a popular technology called virtualization that lets users carve up computer servers so that multiple tasks can be run on one machine. The mainframe long has been valued for its power and security and remains the computer of choice for financial institutions and other big-business and government operations that need hefty processing muscle for sensitive or critical data. But a recent rash of personal-data breaches at a variety of corporations has led to concerns that businesses aren't properly safeguarding what they store. more > IBM's Z9 a Cure All? Who said the PC is killing the mainframe computer? Those that heard IBM officials talk about the potential of the mainframe in the modern computing age would think that Big Iron has always waxed and never waned. For Big Blue the talk is now cantered around collaborative processing at a time when supply chains have gotten incredibly complex. IBM Tuesday launched the z9 mainframe line to applause at an event in New York which included demonstrations of the Blue Gene supercomputer and of course mainframes. By many analysts' accounts the systems vendor hasn't rolled out the red carpet for one of its mainframes in such a showy fashion in years. Then again the z9 surpassed the heights reached by its z990 T-Rex predecessor. more > IBM AS/400 legacy software users up in arms BIG BLUE has had a massive array of programmers developers and customers complaining about its inability to support legacy customers. The AS/400 which was once code named Silverlake was one of the most popular midrange products for corporations. In the mid to late 80s IBM sold loads of these systems while corporate customers got confused by SAA and by the deliberate obfuscation it engaged in over PS/2 and OS/2. (passim) According to a number of people IBM has now infuriated many of its most loyal customers because in one of the corporate customers' words On the one hand IBM is pumping money into development and marketing its legacy midrange product the AS/400 while on the other hand it is trying to bury the most popular open source product on that platform. more > Built to change not built to last In recent posts I've been talking about legacy systems how certain systems seem to have lasted and will continue to last through the ages. Like Rocks of Gibraltar. Or the Rolling Stones. It's time to shift gears. Namely that service orientation is about fluidity for short-term needs not rock-likeness to last through the centuries. The software and systems we will be using in the future will be collections of components brought together on almost an ad-hoc basis to support the business processes that need to be addressed. We're talking about modular shareable or even disposable software more > Cal Software lays ground for £5m agribusiness deal Farming giant Frontier Agriculture has announced a £5m deal to roll out Cal Software’s Progress OpenEdge applications across its newly merged company. The deal marks one of the largest IT investments in UK agribusiness. Frontier formed from a merger of Banks Cargill and Allied Grain in April is looking to standardise systems practices and culture across both former companies. The contract covers the provision of the Compac Gold product family for grain and fertiliser trading seed manufacturing supply chain management and enterprise resource planning. more > Leeds races to finish IT overhaul to meet e-government deadline Leeds City Council is battling to complete a fundamental IT overhaul that will let it meet end of year targets to offer citizens joined up services. To hit the targets imposed by prime minister Tony Blair the council needs to complete by September an infrastructure upgrade programme with eight simultaneous streams each one involving major IT surgery. The council is now 55% through the overhaul said Anthony Burnham Leeds City Council programme manager. Work underway includes updating 11 000 desktops and 300 applications creating a single Citrix server farm standardising on a single version of the Lotus Notes e-mail system and rolling out Novell desktop and server applications. more > Top Vendors Maintain Their Positions in the Growing Application Deployment Software Market IDC Find According to IDC the top ranking vendors of application deployment software for 2004 remained the same as in 2003 with IBM BEA and Oracle holding shares of 37% 12% and 7% respectively. Looking specifically at Linux- and Unix-based application deployment software BEA continued to hold market-share lead in both. IBM continued to lead on Windows mainframe and OS/400 platforms and maintained a wide overall lead primarily due to its popular transaction-server and message-oriented middleware. In addition Oracle experienced strong growth overall at a rate of twice the market average. more > Over-complex IT creates cost headache for bosses: UK companies are locked into a vicious cycle of spiralling costs and inefficiency as a result of over-complex IT systems.Three-quarters of the 455 silicon.com readers surveyed by the Bathwick Group said their company had ended up with equipment from multiple vendors as a result of various projects. Two-thirds (69 per cent) said that most of their core applications ran on their own servers - the result of buying new systems for each big project rather than working towards a standard infrastructure. more > SOA's legacy One reader of this blog recently made a very astute point: that the reason people think older houses were built better is because the ones that weren't built well probably collapsed some time ago. Likewise the legacy we see around are the solidly built applications that survived years or decades. The clunkers fell by the wayside and were never discussed again. All the more reason to keep legacy systems around and make the investment in a Web services layer that could help modernize the still-chugging but nonetheless clunky green-screen system. In a recent post IONA's Eric Newcomer talks about the recent ComputerWorld article on the second look many companies are taking at legacy systems that would have been on the way to the proverbial landfill. more > Europe faces 'imminent' IT skills crisis European companies are facing an imminent skills crisis as a shortage of computer graduates and a retiring technical workforce threatens to bite IT departments by 2006. A study of almost 50 firms by Forrester predicts end-clients across the continent will see their IT skills requirements shift away from technicians and move towards business-orientated profiles. Yet the technology researcher warned that the shift from enterprise is due to impact recruitment and education systems making it difficult for clients to find business savvy technicians in time to meet renewed demand. Richard Peynot senior analyst and author of the report; Europe’s looming skills deficit says that the skills shortage in 2006 will be compounded by service providers seeking to hire staff with technical expertise. more > Halfords replaces core IT and stock systems Car and bike accessory retailer Halfords has completed the second phase of a major project to update its IT systems. Halfords which used to be owned by Boots until it was sold to venture capitalist CVC Capital Partners in 2002 is in the process of replacing ageing legacy systems with corporate supply chain and store systems intended to improve the flexibility of the business. 'We are three years into a five-year change programme. This includes a technology refresh with three major components ' said Brian Scott head of business systems at Halfords. more > IBM preps big iron fiesta IBM will try to breath life into its languishing mainframe business during an event next week if its CFO and marketing material are to be believed.Big Blue's CFO Mark Loughridge used an earnings conference call this week to declare the end of what has been a long (zSeries) product cycle with new gear being displayed next week and delivered in September. In addition IBM's public relations staff have sent press an invitation to a July 26 event in New York that will provide a glimpse at the future of computing systems technology. Or in this case the reworking of computing's past. more > Mainframe revenues slip again Mainframe revenues nosedived this quarter as zSeries MIPS (million instructions per second) shipments were down 19% and revenues slipped 24% from last year. This will be the third consecutive quarter that mainframe revenues missed their mark. The market's expectation for new mainframes may have contributed to the slump. New zSeries mainframes are slated to be announced next week and ship toward the end of Q3. According to Mike Kahn managing director of Wellesley Mass.-based Clipper Group it's not uncommon for customers to have a strong inkling when something is going to happen. more > IBM Readies Its Next Mainframe: New zSeries aims to keep Mainframe Customers on big iron IBM will unveil its newest mainframe computer next week though the company's being cagey so far about what will be better about the upcoming version. Speaking Monday to investment analysts following the release of the company's second-quarter financial results IBM CFO Mark Loughridge blamed the weak second-quarter performance of IBM's mainframe business on the impending launch. The company's revenue from mainframe sales during the period declined 24% year-over-year as we approach the end of what has been a long product cycle Loughridge said. The CFO said the newest member of the IBM zSeries line would be announced next week and available in mid-September. The formal launch is expected to come next Tuesday at an event in New York City. more > Cybermation and Micro Focus Seal Agreement with Lombard Canada; Customer Win; Partnership Supports E Cybermation a leading developer of enterprise job scheduling and software change management solutions and Micro Focus(R) a provider of legacy application development and deployment software for enterprise platforms have signed a joint technology and co-marketing agreement. This will enable both companies to co-ordinate their activities and work in partnership to offer increased return on investment for enterprises migrating from legacy mainframe environments to distributed platforms. This alliance initiative has already helped to secure its first customer win with Lombard Canada Ltd based in Toronto. The insurance company experienced a decline in the return on investment of its mainframe systems and decided to seek a more cost-effective replacement. Following an extensive analysis and evaluation process Lombard chose to move all of its core applications off the mainframe and on to Windows Server(TM) 2003 operating system and SQL Server(TM) in a project expected to save the company up to $1 million a year. more > Isle of Man government consolidates on Windows platform The Isle of Man Government (IoMG) went from having a highly diverse IT infrastructure in 2002 to standardising on Microsoft's software platform and recently told Computer Weekly it will soon replace its Oracle Financials ERP system with Microsoft Axapta. IoMG's main objectives were to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and better manage IT. The infrastructure originally comprised UnixWare Novell NetWare Sun Solaris and Windows. more > AttachmateWRQ and Kapow Technologies Boost Value of E-Business Initiatives Through Web and Legacy Ap AttachmateWRQ and Kapow Technologies today announced a worldwide partnership enabling businesses to speed and increase the value of their e-business initiatives through the integration of web and legacy applications. Under the agreement AttachmateWRQ will offer Kapow RoboSuite web integration software with Verastream host integration software to customers worldwide. The collaboration between AttachmateWRQ and Kapow Technologies produces a timely solution that supports multiple critical business requirements including e-business enablement and the ability to maximize existing IT investments reduce costs and increase productivity. more > Micro Focus MigrationWare partner to migrate legacy applications to agile low-cost platforms - St Micro Focus today announced that it has successfully partnered with MigrationWare a leading provider of application systems migration technologies to migrate critical legacy applications from proprietary mainframe environments to the Microsoft Windows platform. St Helens Council on Merseyside is the latest local government authority to have realised the benefits of moving off the mainframe with an immediate £300 000 reduction in annual hardware and software costs. more > Forrester weighs in on future of IT workforce in U.S. and abroad; how the opportunity simultaneously IT isn't dead -- just suffering a 'midlife crisis' notes a recent piece of trend analysis from Forrester Research. The focus and nature of IT employment will change dramatically from blue-collar technical-based skills to more white-collar management and design-centric positions. Indeed the shift has been happening for some time with the first rumblings being in the growth of offshore outsourcing. Forrester's prediction is that while this kind of outsourcing will eventually corner the blue-collar technical-based side of IT the spread of the information economy in the United States will generate new jobs and transform existing ones. more > Just Imagine I tend to have a favorite quote in each week's issue -- one that conveys a fact of life in a few simple words. Last week I found it in Gary Anthes' story Love that 'Legacy' where Northrop Grumman Ship Systems CIO Jan Rideout cautioned against expectations of big maintenance cost savings by moving applications off a mainframe. That's overhyped by the suppliers who want to encourage you to replace your mainframe systems Rideout said. She's right of course. So few vendors are making money off of mainframes that there's a concerted effort afoot to convince you to abandon them. The easiest way to do that is to create a buzz that positions mainframes as dinosaurs and the person who supports them as a troglodyte who would dent a blade server if he bumped his head on it. more > Microsoft's mainframe strategy: Divide and conquer -- someday The strategy Microsoft has for its Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is a realistic one simply because it has to be. Redmond is well aware of the fact that the mainframe has not only survived a death watch it's here to stay. For Microsoft success at least for now means grabbing the low-hanging fruit. The company plans to pluck customers from companies with small numbers of MIPS. The company hopes this will establish a firm credibility base among zSeries users which it can build on. more > Reserve Bank questions Westpac on mainframe outage New Zealand's Reserve Bank has issued a please explain notice to Westpac following a mainframe outage in Australia that put at risk the bank's ability to make international settlements. The outage took out the gateway early on June 20 for the New Zealand subsidiary to access the Swift international settlement network. It wasn't until 10pm that Westpac New Zealand was able to resume making settlements. more > |
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