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COBOL Technology
Business PerspectiveRetiring boomers about to leave a big hole in the market for skilled legacy system workers Economist David Foot famously claimed in his best-seller Boom Bust & Echo that demographics explain two-thirds of everything. It appears that information technology is no exception.
The first of the baby boomer generation reached the age of 60 this year and by 2016 most will be retired. For many a growing worry is the potential skills gap that the boomers could leave in their wake. It's a gap that's of particular concern to banks hospitals governments and other organizations that still rely on the mainframe and legacy systems those boomers built 20 30 or even 40 years ago.
“When there is an incoming skills deficit and another outgoing one looming at the top end from retirees you have a recipe for a very serious problem ” said Stephen Ibaraki vice-president of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS).
For years we've been hearing about the imminent obsolescence of mainframe applications but in most cases the costs and time required to migrate or de-commission them have been too high. 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.
CIO's past shows company's future
THE career background of a newly recruited chief information officer is a telling sign of where a business wants to head according to a senior executive at Forrester Research.
As well as being a sure sign that IT is maturing this strategy enables CIOs to focus more critically on the business's needs.
From anecdotal evidence Forrester Research IT management team vice-president Bobby Cameron estimates that Australia is level with North America where 35 per cent of CIOs don't have a technical background.
The key driver for people taking over IT roles is a business orientation he says.
ed vendor that can provide powerful enterprise evolution and modernization offerings to federal state and local governments.
BearingPoint to distribute Calif. payroll
BearingPoint Inc. won a $69 million contract with California to implement a new payroll and human resources IT system the company announced today. BearingPoint based in McLean Va. will work with SAP Public Services Inc. Washington to implement the new system. The initiative which is led by the state controller’s office will replace a 30-year-old computer system programmed in Cobol. The new payroll system will eliminate the need for many paper forms. Instead state employees will have self-service access to the system allowing them to manage employment payroll benefits leave accrual timekeeping and position management data according to a BearingPoint statement. BearingPoint will serve as the system integrator on the project with SAP Public Services providing its commercial human resources management system mySAP as the foundation of the system. Both companies were selected in independent requests for proposals.
Forrester Predicts Drivers in IT Market for 2006
Integration security and standards-based technology implementation are the major software issues for government IT execs in 2006. Approaches to custom development like agile processes and application life-cycle management lead and attitudes toward open source and SOA are similar to those of their private sector counterparts. Dealing with legacy mainframe COBOL apps is the biggest differentiator between government and nongovernment software organizations.
Lessons from an SOA pioneer
Shipping company Con-Way began its SOA journey eight years ago providing one illustration of how the new architecture approach can go the distance. Today SOA (service-oriented architecture) is the undisputed champion of IT trends. But IT professionals have seen other megatrends come and go some successful some disastrous. Many companies remain skeptical about SOA in part because most deployments are recent leaving any assessment of long-term viability inconclusive. Yet a handful of deployments that began before the SOA acronym was coined are beginning to suggest how effective the service-based approach to application architecture and business agility can be over the long haul. Among these Con-Way Transportation Services stands out as an ambitious successful reinvention of one enterprise's application infrastructure. The IT staff calculated that following a conventional app-dev approach reworking Cobol applications for shipment management to meet requirements would take five years -- not exactly an agile turnaround.
Technology's Barriers to Exit
Opinion: When purchasing technology what happens beyond the costs of acquisition and operation? ….So if you stop and think about it the biggest issue you have is not How do I get my new IT initiative going? It's How in 18 months will I be able to kill it? How will I move on to the next-better answer? To make my point with a well-known Wall Street company I said You're a mainframe shop right? Can you think of any product or technology in any industry—computers cars planes whatever—that has worse price/performance than the mainframe? We basically agreed that if the mainframe were an airplane it would have pedals on it. So I said if it's that bad turn off your mainframe tonight and replace it with a faster smaller cheaper more energy-efficient server. You'll lower your electric bill and have computing horsepower to spare. The company couldn't do it. It would have to rewrite all that old COBOL code. That's a barrier to exit.
RMS LLC. REPORTS COBOL/CICS FASTER/CHEAPER ON EDEN SERVER 4.0.
Rosebud Management Systems LLC a New Jersey-based leading supplier of Legacy CICS and batch COBOL Mainframe re-hosting solutions has unveiled Eden Server 4.0. Eden a full featured COBOL/CICS(R) emulator that significantly reduces the high costs traditionally associated with Mainframe-based legacy applications by porting them to the Microsoft Windows(R) platform. Eden Server 4.0 addresses the concerns of large and small IT organizations and is designed to provide the highest level of application performance while still distinguishing itself as the Industry's only single-source solution for complete Mainframe decommission projects. Moreover Eden provides all the tools features and capabilities a company needs to streamline and replace their entire mainframe hardware system. All Eden products are built around the Net Express(R) development and run time environment from Micro Focus which allows Eden customers all the benefits of the Net Express(R) development environment.
IT the key to cutting SOX costs The Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) has already celebrated its third birthday. And like many three-year-olds it can still create lots of mess - and plenty of sleepless nights - for the companies that fall under its power. IT departments have had to deal with a fair amount of the teething problems. SOX demands a single version of the truth from companies in terms of the financial figures they deliver. But with the complex systems they have built up one plus one doesn't always equal two which means many companies have been scrambling to get their systems straight. Companies have to prove they have strong controls in place. These controls can cover a range of situations - such as not sending more stock to a customer that has reached its credit limit. This could be done manually by pouring over spreadsheets every week or could be built in automatically. It has also meant staff changes. More than half of IT managers surveyed by Accenture said they have made staffing changes to support compliance and will continue to demand extra staffing over the next one to three years. One area companies have had to be alive to is data integrity issues said Les Stone partner in Accenture's finance and performance management practice. Stone said: What we found was that IT became a critical part of this process.
New South Wales warns of XML silos: XML a great enabler but it use needs careful governance Austra
XML may be seen as the holy grail of information interoperability but the New South Wales government’s experience with the technology warns of how the information silos of yesteryear can be repeated. During a presentation at this year’s OASIS Open Standards conference in Sydney NSW Department of Commerce information architecture manager Ken Bullock says XML is seen as a universal data interchange but “where you can come unstuck is in finding the meaning of the data”. “XML is easy to use but is only effective if done consistently [so] the governance of XML is what we’re about ” Bullock says adding that real interoperability occurs at the semantic level.” Semantics is conveying the meaning of information and the processes experienced in information [therefore] is a business issue ” he says. “Information is a corporate asset anyone using XML needs to understand.” The NSW government’s Chief Information Office headed by CIO Paul Edgecumbe is charged with the daunting task of integrating and rationalising the IT systems of the state’s 180-odd agencies most of which are separate.
Pacific Exchange Selects Micro Focus to Migrate to Windows; Archipelago Holdings Subsidiary and Lead Micro Focus today announced that the Pacific Exchange(R) a subsidiary of Archipelago Holdings has selected Micro Focus to migrate its clearing and billing application from the mainframe to the Microsoft(R) Windows(R) platform as part of an overall effort to save costs and improve productivity.Pacific Exchange's back office application which manages the clearing of trades customer billing and reporting functions for the exchange were residing on an outsourced mainframe system. With growing costs of maintaining the application on an outsourced basis the exchange explored ways to eliminate external costs while maintaining the performance of the application. Following an analysis of a number of options the exchange chose to move the application off the mainframe and onto the Windows platform using Micro Focus' Lift and Shift(TM) solution. To complete the migration of the CICS JCL and COBOL code the exchange is using Micro Focus Studio for application development and Micro Focus Server for deployment to the Windows environment.
Two New iSeries ISVs Target Large Accounts According to Joyce Bordash IBM's director of iSeries ecosystem development more than 244 new ISVs have been lured to the platform since the beginning of 2005 even without a strong push by IBM to grow the ISV base which she maintains numbered 2 608 companies last year. This year our Innovation Initiative is really all about enablement and taking our current set of ISVs and helping to strengthen their applications. The fact that we got new ISVs out of that was wonderful but there really wasn't a concerted effort on our part nor was it one that we invested in heavily. That's on the table for 2006 she says. Nevertheless new iSeries ISVs are popping up and their profiles are interesting. Bordash maintains that IBM hasn't really taken a hard look at the segmentation of those new ISVs which I find somewhat difficult to imagine. Nevertheless when I asked for the opportunity to interview some of these new ISVs the two ISVs IBM suggested I talk to were interesting in that they both target very large companies as customers. I don't mean large SMBs; I mean multi-national Fortune 1 000-sized companies. Of course one cannot read much into a sampling of two. But it is interesting to see the ways in which some non-traditional ISVs are taking a fresh look at the iSeries.
Adelaide Bank shifts platform Adelaide Bank has shifted its margin business lending applications from a legacy mainframe platform to Windows 2000 using tools from technology provider Micro Focus.Leo Ervin solutions architect for Micro Focus said Adelaide Bank was finding it difficult to integrate the margin lending business - which it bought from JP Morgan in 2000 - into its overall business.The margin lending application was developed and hosted on a Data General platform. A few years before the acquisition it was migrated to an UNIX platform and was running in a Data General shell.Ervin said tools developed by Micro Focus enabled the software migration from Data General COBOL to Micro Focus COBOL by December 2003.The application's database layer was then ported to SQL Server and Arena Consulting a company specialising in COBOL database migration developed software to convert the data.
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. This is CGIDEV2 which allowed hard working programmers to write stuff for the Internet using COBOL and/or RPG as a CGI language.
St Helens to make annual savings of £300k by migrating key systems
St Helens Council has migrated core business applications from its IBM s/390 mainframe without having to rewrite or buy in new software. The council’s main reason for migrating away from the s/390 is so it can use features of its Lotus Domino e-mail and document management system that are not available on the mainframe said Steve Sharples the council’s IT business manager. The authority hopes the upgrade will contribute significantly to meeting the annual 2.5% efficiency savings laid down by Whitehall following the Gershon Review.Lower licensing and maintenance costs will save St Helens £300 000 a year and contribute more than the IT department’s share to the Gershon savings.The council has ported 18 applications from the mainframe to Windows and Unix systems on Intel servers and used software from Micro Focus to avoid the lengthy and expensive process of rewriting code. The great legacy skills debate Bill Miller observed in a recent News.com column that much is being made about a so-called mainframe skills crisis as the work force educated in maintaining legacy mainframe systems approaches retirement. However before jumping into panic mode we must first consider the question of precisely which skills we mean before we can provide a coherent statement on the nature of the crisis. There is a world of difference between the skills required to maintain a legacy system and those required to manage the legacy application itself. For example mainframe systems administrators responsible for job schedules systems security and operating system upgrades have different skills from the application developers creating the company's business logic in traditional programming languages such as COBOL PL/I and FORTRAN. COBOL ergo sum
The recent election of a new pope has made me wish I had studied Latin more. When Pope Benedict XVI was announced Vatican officials said habemus papam which is Latin for we have a pope. Though Latin is hardly a relevant spoken language anymore it is very useful to know. I find knowing some helps me understand what English words mean. Knowing Latin also helps me understand some Spanish and other Romance languages. In some ways knowing COBOL is similar. COBOL has been the programming language of choice for many mainframe applications for years. Today a lot more applications are being written in Java and other languages but COBOL has been king for so long that it's hard to imagine a COBOL-less mainframe shop anytime soon. Even if no new lines of COBOL code are written there will be a need for people who know it. Existing applications need to be tweaked and maintained. InformationWeek
Modernizing decades-old back-end IT systems is challenging enough without the backdrop of global conflict. But that's exactly what the Defense Department's Logistics Agency faces in the coming months as it enters the final leg of its long expensive business-system modernization project. By the time the project wraps up in September 2006 it will have moved the Logistics Agency's supply-chain management from Kennedy-era systems to a modern enterprise-resource-planning suite changed the agency's mind-set from warehousing to real-time delivery and introduced new logistical data culled from radio-frequency identification tags positioned worldwide.Over the next year and a half the rest will be migrated off the agency's legacy COBOL-based Standard Automated Material Management System. Micro Focus Launches Cobol Support for 64-Bit Linux on Intel Itanium 2 Micro Focus has announced general availability of Server Express™ for 64-bit Linux applications running on Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based platforms. Server Express™ Micro Focus' industry-standard COBOL development and deployment environment for UNIX and Linux ensures maximum performance for customers upgrading to Linux on an Itanium 2 processor-based platform. With the introduction of support for Linux on an Itanium 2 processor-based platform Micro Focus offers the most comprehensive platform support for customers seeking to maximize productivity and scalability of their legacy applications. Micro Focus previously announced support for HP-UX running on the Itanium 2 processor-based platform.
Toledo schools may resurrect stalled PeopleSoft apps
As it looks to upgrade its legacy big iron ERP system the public school system in Toledo Ohio is also eyeing the resurrection of a $4.3 million PeopleSoft Inc. accounting and human resources software installation it had abandoned five years ago. One of the main drivers behind an outright replacement of the system is the fact that the mainframe's programming is partially in Cobol so it's difficult to find staff to support the system. Burns intends to devise two potential solutions. One might involve throwing an easy-to-use Web-based front end on the mainframe system hiding the back end's complexity from users. Book club opens new chapter with conversion to Windows
There are definite pluses including ROI savings and productivity and performance gains in moving legacy Cobol mainframe apps to Microsoft Windows servers says Leo Theberge CIO at a Canadian book club. But there are also pitfalls to be avoided. In the past year Theberge's company Quebec Loisirs a book club with 280 000 French-speaking members moved core business systems from an IBM S/390 mainframe to a Compaq ProLiant Windows server. The job was done in six months by a four-member migration project team. The conversion went not easy there are no easy projects in IT but it went very well he tells eADT. I was surprised. The book club's customer administration system (CAS) which processes book orders and maintains membership accounts was written in Cobol for CICS on the leased IBM mainframe running VSE. http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=43400005
Struggling retailer will use Manugistics software to reducee inventory levels cut costs and increase sales .
Sears Roebuck & Co. is beginning a project to implement new supply-chain software as part of a five-year revamp of its merchandising systems. The goal is to reduce inventory stock levels on both general and promotional merchandise while cutting carrying costs and driving sales and margins higher.
Unisys Upgrades Clearpath Dorado Mainframes
Unisys Corp yesterday rounded out its annual Clearpath mainframe announcements by delivering faster CMOS mainframe engines on its Sperry Dorado OS2200 mainframes as it did in March with its Burroughs Libra MCP mainframes. With this announcement Unisys is also rolling out a set of application modernization services where it will help its mainframe shops inventory their COBOL applications and create a code repository that should help them figure out how to better modularize their monolithic and often repetitive COBOL code.
Ron Hitchens
Ron Hitchens is a California-based computer consultant and educator whose career dates back to the disco era. His first exposure to computers was operating mainframes in the Air Force. His first programming language was COBOL learned from a friend's borrowed textbook. Since that time Ron has used just about every computer system and programming language you can imagine: from 6502 assembler to XSLT.
Ron spent much of the 1980s at the University of Texas at Austin as student and staffer where he burrowed deep into the Unix kernel and assisted with many interesting research projects.
Ron spent the next several years doing kernel work for clients such as IBM and Unisys. Ron has also developed and taught professional development courses for the same clientele.
SOAP forms global integration
With offices in 35 countries Future Electronics the third largest electronic distributor in the world has developed its own enterprise apps to run its operations. But the firm needed a way to integrate all of its global systems.
New server to reinstate IT's 'hero' rating Microsoft is claiming Virtual Server 2005 will let IT staff look like heroes again. Touting the new release as the solution that will make migration for NT 4.0 users a seamless reality the company said Virtual Server 2005 will address the pain of consolidation and migrating legacy applications.
IBM: Towards a Simplified IT World IBM envisions simplifying the increasingly complex IT enterprise world through software services. The Big Blues considers customers to be spared from managing technology so as to focus on running their businesses. This article examines the competitive situation surrounding this vision.
Moving Apps Proves Stable Ground The market for software that pushes applications across networks grew 4.4 percent in 2003. According to IDC the growth is projected to continue every year through 2008 as IBM continues to lead the space with a healthy market share.
Cognizant in pact with Microsoft
Cognizant Technology Solutions said it had joined Microsoft Corp's mainframe migration alliance to help customers seamlessly migrate critical data and systems to Microsoft.Net-based systems.
Novell releases Mono 1.0
After three years of development open source developers now have an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s .Net application development platform thanks to Novell Inc. which on Wednesday released version 1.0 of its Mono development platform.
Pito warns of barriers to national police database The Police IT Organisation (Pito) said this week that the Scottish Intelligence Database developed over four years at a cost of £11m could not easily interface with the legacy intelligence databases used by many UK forces.
IONA: Our Wares Java-Enable Legacy Apps IONA Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) the provider of integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments says its Artix and Orbix Connect products can easily expose legacy and other non-Java systems and applications for use in new J2EE programming initiatives.
CIO Challenge: Maintenance Costs The Challenge: On average IT maintenance eats up more than $6 out of every $10 in the IT budget. In a bid to battle the maintenance misery and control costs firms are eyeing everything from replacing old equipment and re-evaluating warranty coverage to outsourcing and architecting their systems differently.
Fast Integration for BPM
Business process management (BPM) is becoming a priority at more enterprises and with that comes the requirement of integrating BPM tools to the legacy applications that execute processes.
Lawson Redraws ERP Blueprint
Lawson Software Inc. is overhauling its ERP suite to be more open flexible and modular in an effort to make it easier for customers to add functionality to their Lawson systems.
CEOs urged to rethink corporate approach to IT If CEOs especially those in Europe don't want to be wiped out by their competitors they not only have to invest in information technology but they must also rethink how to deploy IT within their companies a high profile panel of IT executives told attendees of the Forbes CEO forum on Thursday.
DISA looks to integrate legacy apps The Defense Information Systems Agency this week released a request for information on technologies that could transform dozens of legacy applications operating in the agency’s procurement and logistics directorate into a single integrated architecture.
Tools help migrate legacy RTOS apps to TimeSys Linux MapuSoft has announced two products intended to help embedded system developers port legacy RTOS applications to TimeSys Linux. Mapusoft's OS Changer application compatibility layer and OS Abstractor are available now with support for TimeSys Linux and TimeSys's TimeStorm IDE.
Standard Life cuts intranet search time by 50%
Standard Life has completed the first stage in an overhaul of its intranet site to help its 11 000 staff across the UK access business information and share it more effectively. The financial group has installed software from Verity to speed up searches of the intranet from content including Lotus Notes HTML and other documents.
SOAP forms global integration
With offices in 35 countries the IT operation at Future Electronics the third largest electronics distributor in the world developed its own enterprise applications to run its operations. But the organization needed a way to integrate all of its global systems.
GECE aims at Rs 10 cr turnover
Global Energy Consulting Engineers (GECE) a Hyderabad -based IT solutions and consultancy services provider in the energy sector is expanding its operations. It hopes to attain a turnover of Rs 10 crore in the current financial year. As part of its expansion plan the company is adding 100 people this year to the present 50. It has invested about Rs 2 crore to date and it will make need-based investments as it goes ahead.
How often do we actually move data?
Information lifecycle management manages the interrelationship of data storage assets and IT processes. One of the most important justifications for ILM is that data is associated with storage devices and IT processes in accordance with its value to the enterprise. In other words: less important data is assigned to less valuable storage and less intensive processes while data that is more valuable gets better treatment. A linkage is made between business process and the value of data at each stage within the data's life.
MicroFocus Unveils Legacy-to-Web Software
Micro Focus International Ltd. wants to make it easier for businesses to use their legacy mainframe systems in a Web-enabled world. The company with U.S. headquarters in Rockville Md. on Tuesday released its Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition a collection of software designed to enable businesses to take the applications residing on legacy systems and extend them to the world of service-oriented architecture and Web services as well as Microsoft Corp.'s .NET and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s J2EE environments.
Blockade adds mainframe connectivity to Microsoft identity server There's a new leader in the race for the longest product name of the year: Toronto's Blockade Systems which late last month at Microsoft's Tech Ed conference released ManageID Enterprise Suite for Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. We'll call it MES4MIIS (which is now in the running for longest abbreviation of a product name).
Fast Financials; Agri Beef goes online with PeopleSoft in six weeks; replacing legacy systems pursu For many companies an e-business strategy begins with good financial applications. For $500 million Agri Beef though existing financials tools just weren't very strong notes Casey McMullen Agri Beef's director of IS.
Finance firms pay more as IT projects boom Salaries for IT and permanent staff have risen by as much as 15% over the past two quarters as companies upgrade legacy systems to meet the demands of regulations such as Basel 2 and new communications standards.
IBM Tightens COBOL Java Ties; Company updates language tool WebSphere Easing communication between COBOL and Java IBM Corp. was expected last month to announce updated versions of the programming language Enterprise COBOL and its mainframe Java development environment WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer.
Sabre Flies to Open Systems; The air-travel software company has reinvented its 25-year-old mainfram Sabre Holdings Corp. the air-travel software company has an ambitious set of objectives for the remake of its shopping engine a 25-year-old mainframe application with 10 million lines of assembler code that processes more transactions per second than the New York Stock Exchange.
Sabratec Announces the First Integration of Microsoft IBF with Legacy Systems through ApplinX Sabratec Ltd. the leading provider of rapid legacy integration solutions announced today general availability of ApplinX adapter for Microsoft Information Bridge Framework (IBF). The combined solution enables information workers to discover engage and act on enterprise legacy information from the context of their Office documents and email significantly improving productivity and reducing training costs.
XML Plays Big Integration Role for CompuCredit
Until earlier this year CompuCredit (Atlanta $519 million in assets) faced a big challenge managing the information it held on 3.5 million customers which was scattered across more than 100 systems and databases. When holders of the company's Aspire Visa and other credit cards called customer service the calls were too lengthy and sometimes unproductive. The system required customer-service representatives to toggle back and forth between applications which hindered key goals such as convincing a customer to commit to a new payment while on the phone.
Bombardier teaches legacy apps to speak SAP
Before Bombardier Aerospace even decided to implement SAP software in August the Montreal-based aircraft manufacturing company knew it would need an integration platform to make the deployment seamless across its mission-critical applications.
Gartner: SOBAs will revolutionize application integration So you think service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a buzzword today? Brace yourselves for the next generation of application integration acronyms: SOBA. Coined by Gartner Inc. research director Charles Abrams SOBAs or service-oriented business applications are the fruit of service-oriented architectures. They will enable enterprises to dynamically compose and decompose applications according to business needs. Eventually they will link business apps such as ERP CRM and supply chain management in real time.
SAP invests to deliver three-year roadmap SAP has announced a roadmap for the development of its applications over the next three years.
But the business software giant still faces the challenge of migrating its vast base of legacy customers onto its latest technology to take full advantage of the planned advancements.
BEA Seeks Ubiquity Through Open Source Community Say Its Top Execs
Just two full working days after its stock crashed by 23 percent - its biggest drop in more than five years - BEA came out of the corner today fighting with the announcement (already revealed by inside sources earlier today) that it was donating - to what CTO Scott Dietzen referred to as Open Source Land - the first open source application framework targeted at Java-based Web applications: Project Beehive.
IT spending up as users keep a grip on day-to-day costs Growth in IT spending reached 4.7% in the first quarter of 2004 according to the latest Computer Weekly IT Expenditure report. This figure compares with a 4.1% rise for the same period in 2003.
But the spending survey produced by Kew Associates reveals a slight decline in the average rate of growth against the final quarter of 2003 down from 5.2%.
BAT to cut costs on EAI projects BAT which has a £9.2bn annual turnover and spends hundreds of millions of pounds on IT each year hopes to save up to 75% of the costs of integration projects which use middleware from major software suppliers.
Micro Focus and Unilog Move Mainframe Applications to Windows
Micro Focus International Ltd. a provider of COBOL application development and deployment software has entered into a partnership with Unilog the IT systems integrator to port mainframe applications to the Microsoft Windows platform. Micro Focus will combine its knowledge of COBOL applications with Unilog's business sector and applications expertise to enable existing COBOL applications based on proprietary mainframe platforms to run at higher performance levels on low cost technology rich platforms such as Windows and Intel.
Neon Readies Mainframe Integration Tool Neon Systems on Tuesday unveiled a software tool for integrating mainframe applications with software built around a service-oriented architecture.
'You've Got To Integrate'; Naval Facilities Engineering Command looks to make Windows and legacy app The Navy command that oversees the building and maintenance of naval bases around the world will christen a project this week to integrate legacy Web and Windows applications without the time and expense of conventional integration methods. The goal is to use Web services to combine these applications into a larger composite program to eliminate redundant data entry that has caused delays errors and general unhappiness among the command's 900 contract managers. If successful the approach could be duplicated throughout the Navy and the Department of Defense.
IBM looks to modernize Cobol IBM is looking to modernize Cobol applications by bridging its mainframe-oriented Cobol and WebSphere products to Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and service-oriented architectures.
Technology advances but IT's aim must still be to provide visibility to the business Over the past decade the IT industry has experienced some extraordinary ups and downs. From the breakthroughs revolutions and to use the dotcom catchphrase paradigm shifts there have been major advances as well as some hard lessons.
Unisys innovates with new ClearPath mainframe
Unisys's new ClearPath Plus Libra 500 offers a number of innovations including a pay-for-use business model based on new metering technology and access to open source J2EE.
Information central Council contact centers were integrating legacy technology to enable better customer relationship management for many years before the e-government agenda came along. Lindsay Clark talks to those councils with a head start.
Opening up the mainframe Predictions in the 90s that we'd soon see the last of the mainframes were quite clearly way off and far from their demise today's estimates indicate that - 40 years on - mainframes host most business transactions and enterprise data writes Eric Knorr.
Compliance Bonanzas When was the last time you read about a $40 000 retention bonus for someone with a hot skill in IT? I'll bet it was sometime around the turn of the century when Y2k fears had CEOs wringing their hands and CFOs signing checks for whatever IT asked for.
Agilent Technologies Deploys PeopleSoft Enterprise HCM Sales PeopleSoft Inc. (Nasdaq:PSFT) today announced that Agilent Technologies has deployed PeopleSoft(R) Enterprise Sales Incentive Management (SIM) to its global salesforce of more than 2 000 employees. A component of PeopleSoft's industry-leading Human Capital Management (HCM) suite SIM provides organizations with real-time access to critical sales management and compensation information allowing them to better plan design and communicate sales incentive programs.
Micro Focus: Getting CICS From Windows “This is a low-risk route to lower hardware and software costs for mainframe users ” said Ian Archbell vice president of product management at Micro Focus. “For applications running at under 500 MIPS [million instructions per second] the solution is more than adequate ” he claimed asserting further that the solution should be an ample migration path for mainframes now running at less than 1 000 MIPS. “We get the same performance as a mainframe because our native code generators are optimized for the platform.” Archbell provided only anecdotal evidence to back up his claims adding that in-house benchmark performance tests are still under way.
Micro Focus: Getting CICS From Windows
Micro Focus International Ltd. has announced Linux and Unix editions of Mainframe Transaction Option an add-on to its Enterprise Server COBOL runtime environment that it claims provides a stable x86-based platform to which CICS/COBOL transactional applications can migrate. The company in April released an edition for Windows servers.
Halfords upgrades HR and finance to MySAP
The company which has 400 stores across the UK has been revamping its internal systems since August 2002 when it was bought for £400m by private equity firm CVC. The flotation of Halfords is set for the summer following the appointment of brokers to oversee the process.
http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?
Server clusters offer speed savings When retail services firm Datavantage acquired the code last year to roll out its gift-card offering that would provide retailers a transaction platform to store and manage retail credits it knew its back-end system couldn't stand any downtime. It also knew it didn't want to shell out loads of money to keep the system running on the expensive Unix infrastructure on which it was built.
The portability pitfall
Unless you've been living under a rock you know that the big IT news this month is the new détente between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Once bitter enemies these adversaries have agreed to lay down their arms and work together in the spirit of interoperability -- at least in principle. There are many facets to this thawing of relations including joint licensing settlement of lawsuits and a hefty check but both sides claim that the real motivation for the agreement is to improve interoperability between each vendor's products -- because after all their mutual customers are demanding interoperability.
Billions of pounds wasted every year on IT systems in the UK
Fewer than one in five of all IT projects in the UK can be considered truly successful leading to billions of pounds being wasted every year on IT systems according to research from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.
“The UK public sector alone has spent an estimated £12.4bn on software in the past year and the overall UK spend on IT is projected to be a monumental £22.6bn ” said Basil Butler chairman of the working group that produced the report.
Escaping the Mainframe; Tulane University to evade quarter million in annual maintenance fees by mig Tulane University like many other institutes of higher education across the country has had to more with less for some years now. That's why the $250 000 in maintenance fees that the university pays for its Ideal/Datacom mainframe from vendor Computer Associates (CA) troubled the university's new CIO Dr. John Lawson when he came aboard a few years ago.
Infringement Insurance For Open Source Open Source Risk Management's service is designed to help open-source users defend against copyright and patent-infringement claims. Even as SCO Group digests the news that one of its backers a venture-capital firm wants its investment back a risk-assessment firm has launched a service designed to help open-source users defend against copyright and patent-infringement claims involving open source.
IBM Goes Midsize with Mainframe Forty years after introducing its first mainframe server IBM continues to polish the venerable computing platform with hardware and software enhancements designed to make it useful as a data repository and computing engine for Web applications and other newer computing workloads.
Opening up the mainframe
Back in 1991 Stewart Alsop then editor in chief of InfoWorld (US) predicted the plug would be pulled on the last mainframe in five years. Oops. Eight years after their forecasted demise mainframes today host by most estimates the majority of business transactions and enterprise data. IBM which now enjoys a virtual monopoly on big iron sold US$6.8 billion's worth in 2003 a year that saw sales of IBM zSeries mainframes (whose top-end models go by the nickname T-Rex ) jump 33 per cent.
The Mainframe Turns 40
Last week the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA celebrated the mainframe computer's fortieth birthday. In the early 1960s IBM took $5 billion (the equivalent to $30 billion today) and bet the company on new computer technology. And on April 7 1964 legendary IBM leader Tom Watson Jr. announced the launch of the System/360 hailed as the largest privately financed commercial project ever. Of course it changed the world.
Microsoft Micro Focus target mainframes
Microsoft and mainframe software company Micro Focus have strengthened an alliance aimed at luring away IBM mainframe customers. At a customer event Thursday in New York the two companies are expected to announce an extension to their existing partnership and to tout the benefits of moving mainframe applications onto Intel servers running Windows. In particular the partnership is designed to provide an alternative to the customers running Customer Information Control System (CICS) a widely used mainframe transaction system.
Microsoft Micro Focus form alliance to target mainframes Microsoft Corp. and Micro Focus International Ltd. today announced an alliance to promote the migration of mainframe applications onto Intel Corp. servers running Windows using Microsoft's .Net technology. Although CIOs and architects recognize the inherent value of legacy applications they continue to grapple with how to migrate mainframe applications on Windows and .Net to extend use and support development in Web services or XML according to Micro Focus.
Microsoft and mainframe software company Micro Focus International have strengthened an alliance aim At a customer event Thursday in New York the two companies are expected to announce an extension to their existing partnership and to tout the benefits of moving mainframe applications onto Intel servers that run Windows. In particular the partnership is designed to provide an alternative to customers who run Customer Information Control System (CICS) a widely used mainframe transaction system.
IBM unveils z890 mainframe server : It marks the 40th anniversary of its first mainframe computer IBM today is marking the 40th anniversary of its first mainframe by introducing the zSeries 890 mainframe server for midsize enterprise customers. We're introducing a brand-new IBM eServer zSeries 890 and it's the latest and greatest in mainframe technology for smaller mainframe customers said Colette Martin IBM's director of zSeries product marketing. Last year we introduced the z990 which was aimed at our largest customers. The z890 now brings all that same technology to medium-size enterprises that really need all that mainframe security availability and resiliency.
Health System Uses BMC Tools to Cut Mainframe Upgrade Costs
After using performance management software to improve batch-processing times for accounting and other functions the WakeMed Health Network last week said it will be able to upgrade to a new mainframe this month for $850 000 less than it originally expected.
Doing it by the book delivers dividend
For Bertelsmann the media group sales through its book clubs are significant amounting to €2.7bn globally in 2002. With this level of sales the clubs need robust IT systems so in 1984 those in Austria Switzerland and Italy formed the ICS CompetenceCenter and based it in Vienna. Later clubs in Hungary the Czech Republic Poland and French Canada also joined.
Breaking News--Unisys Unveils New Mainframes
In what the company described as its most significant new product announcements since 1996 if not longer Unisys Corp. unveiled its newest mainframes yesterday the ClearPath Plus Libra 500 Series. We are offering several industry firsts Chander Khanna vice president for platform marketing told 5 Minute Briefing in an exclusive interview including a pay-for-use business model based on new metering technology access to open source J2EE and a building block infrastructure that allows companies to mix and match server modules in the same system cabinet.
Cobol preps for a much-needed celebrity makeover with tools from Acucorp and Micro Focus
Cobol has certainly taken hits to its integrity over the four-plus decades it’s been in service. It’s now widely renowned as cumbersome and inflexible to today’s IT requirements. Despite such an unflattering description the vast majority of today’s high-profile enterprise business logic actually resides in mainframe Cobol applications.
Opening of the Mainframe
Back in 1991 InfoWorld's then Editor in Chief Stewart Alsop predicted the plug would be pulled on the last mainframe in five years. Oops. Eight years after their forecasted demise mainframes today host by most estimates the majority of business transactions and enterprise data. IBM which now enjoys a virtual monopoly on big iron sold $6.8 billion's worth in 2003 a year that saw sales of IBM zSeries mainframes (whose top-end models go by the nickname T-Rex ) jump 33 percent.
Is it time to retire big iron?
Charles Fitzgerald Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategies insists that he has no ax to grind about big iron. But over the past year he says “we’ve had a whole bunch of customers come to us and say ‘What can you do to help us get off the mainframe?’” Fitzgerald says that these pleas derive partly from the fact that the mainframe guys are retiring and partly from IT’s intense focus on lowering costs. “What people have figured out is they’re paying obscene quantities of money. A Wintel server today is about $2 a MIP. A mainframe MIP is about $2000. That’s three orders of magnitude.”
Back to the mainframe; Linux helps some companies get more out of big iron
How do you introduce a mainframe to the world of modern IT? According to IBM you run Linux on it. Big Blue says the open source OS first offered on zSeries mainframes in 2000 now accounts for approximately 17 percent of IBM's mainframe revenue and 22 percent of hardware capacity shipped to customers. At the end of 2003 IBM had close to 300 customers running Linux in production environments and more than 1 000 customers in some stage of deployment.
JavaOne to yield plethora of tools
IN ADDITION TO featuring endeavors by heavyweights such as Sun Microsystems and Oracle the JavaOne show this week also will host a slew of other companies detailing new wares ranging from development tools for Web services to business-to-business functionality.
Q&A -- Looking Back Looking Ahead at the Mainframe
Come April it will be time to sing a round or two of Happy Birthday to the mainframe which marks its introduction 40 years ago. That’s right the Big Four-O. With this in mind we thought it would be an opportune occasion to speak with David Mastrobattista zSeries marketing manager with IBM about the mainframe at midlife.
Bigger & Better
Just a few years ago a data warehouse or transactional database that approached a terabyte was considered big. Today big means tens of terabytes. Here's the story behind four of the largest data systems in the world plus a government database project expected to reach up to 5 petabytes (or 5 000 terabytes) within several years and up to 50 petabytes in 20 years. All are examples of organizations pushing the edge of what's possible with database technologies.
Opinion: How IT has outsourced itself
Americans have an unwavering faith that technology can solve all of their problems but they tend to forget that it also creates new ones in the process. The leading edge of technology innovation often cuts both ways. Perhaps the best example of this is the current election-year brouhaha over the accelerating trend of outsourcing U.S. jobs in general -- and IT jobs in particular.
Opinion: How IT has outsourced itself
Americans have an unwavering faith that technology can solve all of their problems but they tend to forget that it also creates new ones in the process. The leading edge of technology innovation often cuts both ways. Perhaps the best example of this is the current election-year brouhaha over the accelerating trend of outsourcing U.S. jobs in general -- and IT jobs in particular.
Mainframes
In recent years application integration has moved from an interesting technical challenge to become a mainstream discipline that most CIOs have at the very top of their project lists. Initially seen as a way of synchronizing important business data under the control of various applications it has evolved into a platform to streamline business processes and improve efficiency by eliminating the friction that occurs inside businesses as a consequence of data inconsistencies. Furthermore with the advent of ubiquitous Internet connectivity it has been used to ensure disintermediated applications have the accuracy necessary to encourage confident use by customers suppliers and partners alike.
The Myths of Open Source
At first glance the company Employease seems unremarkable. But look a little closer. Employease which provides employee benefits administration services to more than 1 000 organizations across America has an IT architecture chiefly built around open-source software which makes it a rare bird—not that it was planned that way when the company was founded in 1996.
PalmSource targets the enterprise with Palm OS Cobalt
The wait may soon be over for large enterprises that have been anxious for PalmSource to beef up its operating system for enterprise-class applications. At last week's PalmSource Developer Conference the company announced its latest operating system aimed at powering the next generation of mobile devices and smart phones. Palm OS Cobalt is designed to create new categories of devices for the communications enterprise education and entertainment markets the company said. The enterprise features include better security support (including VPNs) larger memory better network connectivity and communications options and multitasking functionality.
GUEST COMMENTARY: Why is 'Business Logic' an oxymoron?
Dear executive: quick! Where is your business logic? In the business or application tier of your n-tier architecture? Ingrained in your business and enterprise applications? How about stored procedures in your databases? You wouldn't have any business logic in your client apps portals or Web pages would you? How about your identity and access management software? What's that you say? All of the above? The fact of the matter is for most large organizations (and many midsize ones as well) business logic resides in all of these places and more. Where it doesn't reside is in the hands of the business people. And there's the contradiction: how can business logic be business logic if it's locked away in the technology rather than in the hands of the business?
Two Sides to Every Transformation
Phil Murphy of Giga Information Group was reading the Oct. 15 issue of SD Times when he came across my story about Object Management Group’s effort to create a specification for transforming legacy applications and systems to bring them up to date. “I thought ‘I’ve gotta rebut this somehow ’” Murphy recalled of the article (“Breathing New Life Into Legacy Systems). “It’s like communism. In theory it sounds good but there’s always a ruling class somewhere.”
Sidebar: How DaimlerChrysler Services Did It
Systems integrators at DaimlerChrysler Services North America started with a portfolio of 90 major systems from the merger of Chrysler Financial and Mercedes-Benz Credit. The basic architecture -- mainframe batch Cobol CICS and DB2 -- wasn't changed. Most of the development work involved changes to applications including upgrades to functions in the CF applications and adding MBC functions to those systems.
But it's still a really clever solution
It's the late 1980s and this Cobol programmer pilot fish gets a new assignment: Write a program that can slice and dice mainframe security information then generate reports. I'm told there's a need for a print-out of security information based on dynamic parameters fish says. For instance by user -- what files is a specific user allowed to read and write? -- or by file -- which users have access to a particular file?
OMG at work on legacy transform spec
The Object Management Group’s (OMG) Legacy Transformation PSIG scheduled meetings in London recently where the agenda included plans to release the first new set of OMG standards for transforming legacy software.
“People have been trying to sidestep this thing for years and they’re finding that they can no longer sidestep it ” said William Ulrich president of the Soquel Calif.-based Tactical Strategy Group Inc. and co-chair of the PSIG. “With all the integration technologies new development tools and techniques and languages and platforms they’ve got to address it head on.”
IT still a hot career after tech meltdown
It's a far cry from the promise of six-figure salaries but maintenance and upgrades of computer systems will always be required Gillian Shaw writes. When Misty Moon isn't hitting the beaches with her waveboard or taking runners out at first base on Radiant Communications' softball team she heads Radiant's mostly male tech-support team. The 26-year-old B.C. Institute of Technology grad has carved out a career in one area of information technology that survived the tech meltdown and offers good prospects as the sector struggles back on track.
Micro Focus CEO Wants Partners To Help Sweat Cobol
As the CEO of Micro Focus Tony Hill sees Cobol applications on mainframes as assets that IT organizations can leverage on new more nimble Windows Linux and Unix platforms running Web services technologies. Hill says Micro Focus is dedicated to providing tools for that migration -- and earlier this month Micro Focus launched a variant of its tools that support the Microsoft.Net framework. In an interview with CRN Editor-in-Chief Michael Vizard Hill said Micro Focus' greatest asset is its ability to help IT organization sweat the maximum value out of existing applications.
IBM pushes new bank apps
In its second such deal since late October IBM last week said it plans to work with a banking software vendor in India to develop J2EE-based applications that will be pitched as a replacement for banks' aging core processing systems. The software that will result from the joint development pacts will run on IBM's servers and use its WebSphere middleware technology and DB2 databases.
The Programmers Future
Coding software has been a good living for a half million or more--sometimes far more--Americans during the last decade. Now it's the IT job category that bears the highest unemployment rate at 7.1% this year. Low-cost global competition and changing technologies have dimmed the career prospects of many programmers in this country and cast the role's future into doubt. To programmers like Kevin Mueller and Garrison Hoffman these grand economic changes are as personal as a paycheck.
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Money Machines
For 38 years Pacific Gas & Electric Co. had the same software application at the heart of its customer-information-management system. The application handled the California utility's billing and credit-history tasks managing 6.5 million customer accounts and cranking out 250 000 gas and electricity bills every day. Other PG&E systems such as customer-service and maintenance apps tapped into it for customer information.
Legacy-System Updates Get A Second Look
Are your company's legacy IT systems keeping your business from moving forward? A recent survey of 115 business-technology professionals by the research arm of Optimize a sister publication of InformationWeek found that 84% are assessing the strategic value of their legacy hardware and software platforms.
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Vendor brings Cobol apps to the Web
The theme for Web services is integration and Micro Focus plans to bring Cobol into the picture by equipping companies with tools that convert the legacy code to align with the emerging technology. Micro Focus last week released its Net Express with .Net a tool that will let companies adapt Cobol running on mainframes to work with Microsoft's .Net Web services model. The conversion is designed to help companies reuse existing applications and potentially cut computing costs as more business transactions move to the Web.
Dressing up COBOL in modern garb A fair criticism of the trade press is that we are fascinated with new technology and lose sight of the fact that you folks are mired in legacy molasses. Take COBOL. While headlines today focus on things such as Java and Microsoft's .Net according to statistics gathered by The Senior Staff a San Jose databank of IT professionals over the age of 35:
• 75% of business data is processed in COBOL (Source: Gartner).
• There are 180 billion to 200 billion lines of COBOL in use worldwide (Gartner).
• 15% of new applications are written in COBOL (Gartner).
• Replacement costs for COBOL systems estimated at $25 per line are in the hundreds of billions of dollars (Tactical Strategy Group).
Jobless Recovery
You already know the employment situation is bad; now the data is available to show the true state of the business-technology job market. InformationWeek's analysis of newly parsed government data provides an eye-opening picture of IT employment. If you're a computer programmer or a database administrator you face jobless rates higher than the general workforce. The same applies if your college degree dates from around 1970 or earlier. But the situation is better than average if you're a business-technology manager computer scientist or software engineer.
Developing Trends: One Tool Doesn't Cut It
Let's say you call in a carpenter to get an estimate on some trim work in your house. He shows up on time speaks knowledgeably about the project and quotes a fair price. You have every reason to believe he'll do a professional job so you sign on the dotted line. A week later he comes back ready to tackle the job but you notice he's brought only one tool and it's not a Skilsaw or a coping saw it's a Sawzall. Now a Sawzall is a versatile tool you're thinking but it's not intended to cut trim. I'm going to end up with Breathing New Life Into Legacy Systems
An RFP allowing interoperability among applications and data residing on different platforms and written in different languages is expected to be issued by Object Management Group Inc.’s Legacy Transformation Task Force at the organization’s meeting next month in London. Approximately 40 software vendors and customers are participating in the effort according to William Ullrich co-chairman of the group and president of Tactical Strategy Group Inc. a consulting firm specializing in organizational and information transformation.
BEA's Top Down Strategy for Dynamic Response
It is an interesting time in the transition of the software industry. A myriad of companies are rearchitecting their IT infrastructure offerings to make them more modular more component-based and more flexible. It is important for CIOs to understand how companies with large customer bases and deep technology are making the transition from traditional architectures to service oriented architectures that support the notion of
Dynamic Response .
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Q&A: Cognos CEO Ron Zambonini
Thousands of companies conduct business with millions of customers but do they ever really know how well they are serving those customers the lifeblood of their existence? There are plenty of ways to tell how products services or salespeople are doing -- the proof is in the pudding in this case the sales and success ratios.
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Extend and Win The real nitty-gritty of enterprise application integration is the notoriously difficult task of opening up legacy systems to distributed end users. The problem isn't so much that legacy applications are cumbersome to use. Rather the ability to centrally manage your applications deploy new ones to users and make on-the-fly modifications to up-and-running applications poses stumbling blocks for IT managers whose companies run business logic at the edges of their networks. Another problem is that developers familiar with Java .Net and other object- and/or service-oriented languages may have little experience with Cobol and other mainframe languages Fall Conference: CIOs Say Legacy Systems Are Useful But Costly Legacy systems are an asset but a troubling one that consumes too much of the IT budget a group of CIOs at the InformationWeek Fall Conference in Tucson Ariz. said during a panel discussion Tuesday. During “Legacy Systems: Assets Or Anchors?” Griffin Macy VP of enterprise system development for Waste Management Inc. said any system more than 3 years old including Web applications is considered a legacy system at his company. Overview: Excellence On A Budget IT managers work hard to stake out their identity as innovators not just cost centers in need of pruning. Times aren’t quite as tough this year for America’s CIOs as in the recent past but the signs of economic recovery have been slow to reach their budgets. Market researchers forecast a comeback in the decimated chip sector led in part by a rebound in corporate PC buying. Strength in consumer spending and a recovery in capital investment by businesses--signs of demand for companies’ products--are fueling optimism about an expanding economy. Metals & Natural Resources: Going For The Custom Advantage Despite a growing practice among many IT executives to buy enterprise applications and systems a do-it-yourself mindset can be found among CIOs at leading natural-resource and metals companies. Conventional wisdom goes that it costs a lot less to buy packaged software on which vendors have worked with numerous customers and incorporated best practices than to build unique applications just for your business. Besides it saves IT organizations from having to hire the technology talent required to develop the apps. Mainframes: Ripe and ready for grid Saying the mainframe won't be part of grid computing is like saying budding Nascar legend Jeff Gordon will be driving a Ford at next year's Daytona 500 -- and so will Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart and everyone else. Never going to happen. Here's why. Just as it wouldn't be Nascar without a mix of cars -- Chevys Dodges and Fords -- a grid wouldn't be a grid without multiple platforms and the mainframe will definitely be a part of the lineup. How about an article on what can’t be outsourced? Old-style business application coding -- what we used to do in Cobol for example -- will be done offshore but what about network administration/security? Also upstream activities that require contact with end users such as requirements analysis and database design probably can’t be done as well overseas. And if Linux becomes big on the desktop supporting end users will be one heck of a growth industry! In-House Innovation Given the direction things are going you might think that the internally developed application is an endangered species. A lot of technology is fast becoming a commodity with low-cost computers and off-the-shelf software making it possible to buy an end-to-end IT infrastructure. When software development is required a growing number of companies turn to offshore contractors. And if a company does put software developers to work many of them aren’t using state-of-the-art tools. “Your average developer spends less money on tools than they do on lattes ” laments Java creator James Gosling a VP and Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems. The Guts To Say 'Go'
Daniel Kaberon had a reputation. If anyone started getting too excited about grid computing Kaberon could be counted on to throw a big bucket of cold water on it. I was a loud voice saying it makes sense if you're looking for extraterrestrials or figuring out the number of vowels in the New York phone book says Kaberon director of computer resource management at Hewitt Associates LLC a human-resources consulting and outsourcing company that manages benefits for one in 20 Americans. I didn't see how it worked in a business process.
CEO on the state of Micro Focus Two years after the undoing of its merger with Merant Inc. Micro Focus has returned to its roots just in time to take advantage of rampant IT cost cutting said CEO Tony Hill. As an independent company we've been able to stay a bit more passionate and focused Hill told eADT. The strategy of helping IT operations to include legacy systems in new development can work wonders in a flagging economy with little spending on new technologies. New Ways to Communicate The industry conferences I attend have always attracted early technology adopters laden with PDAs cell phones notebooks and e-mail gadgets way before they became mainstream. The recent Supernova 2003 conference in Washington D.C. was no exception. I found myself interested not only in the content of the conference but also in the technology that the attendees were using. At the conference former FCC chairman Reed Hundt argued that the current policy of requiring the existing phone and cable companies to install high-speed connections is not sufficient to deliver high-speed lines (10 Mbps or faster) everywhere. He argued that the government should subsidize universal high-speed connections to every home in the U.S. serviced by multiple ISPs. Going There Doing That Asked about their companies' offshore outsourcing experiences and expectations 101 CIOs IT executives and managers in a CIO survey confirmed what you might expect. India was the major destination (89 percent have work done there). Labor costs were the biggest area for savings (according to 86 percent of respondents). And application development was the main activity (86 percent contracted for this work offshore). The survey also found that companies expect a fast return and other benefits from going offshore. The Radicalization of Mike Emmons Mike Emmons’ home office doesn't look like much: just a desk some shelves littered with books a couple of computers a server a printer and some other gadgets. But for the past 11 months it's been headquarters for a ferocious one-man campaign against the practice of offshore outsourcing and supplanting American workers with foreigners on temporary work visas. Emmons lost his programming job last winter when his entire IT department at Siemens Information Communication Networks (ICN) was outsourced to an Indian company. zSeries: Out with the old in with the new Despite recent reports don’t expect delays in the scheduled rollout of the z990 mainframe’s features and functionality says Kyle Van Kleek IBM’s director of zSeries products. In part two of this Search390.com interview Van Kleek the man responsible for the design and development of zSeries servers goes over some of those new features. He also talks about the end of 31-bit hardware and offers up IBM’s response to recent advancements in competing technologies. IBM takes new tack to mainframe pricing In a continuing effort to get the industry to recognize the mainframe not as a dinosaur but as a powerful and flexible enterprise server IBM on Friday announced new pricing initiatives for big iron that include reductions in the cost of software licenses by as much as 75%. IBM also delivered a mainframe charter that spells out how it intends to move forward with the mainframe in terms of solutions and value propositions. The intent said IBM is to lure customers into moving nontraditional mainframe applications including tools from SAP AG and Siebel Systems Inc. as well as Web-based applications to the zSeries -- including the new z990 or T-Rex which was introduced in May. Demand for Cobol skills on the rise At a recent gathering of IT leaders one IT director from a well-known insurance firm confessed he was facing a team skills crisis. Although he needed people who knew legacy systems he found that his team of web developers and Java programmers were reluctant to learn older programming languages such as Cobol and RPG. Despite predictions that it is only a matter of time before mainframe operating systems are eradicated from organisations many companies especially in the financial sector are still benefiting from existing legacy assets. Tech Guide: Three Tiers Minus One The purpose of Web-services software is to expose to use the developers’ term data that belongs to a mainframe database application making it accessible by outside programs and means other than the mainframe application’s own terminal screen. Some Web-services packages also enable portions of the mainframe logic such as Cobol procedures to be addressable through other means such as Java applications or HTML pages. With Web services in place customized methods and functions for various sectors or departments of a company or even for individual users can be crafted entirely in-house using inexpensive or even free development tools. Navy Taps Securify to Manage Legacy Apps Risk; Contract aimed at integrating old apps with N/MCI The U.S. Navy has awarded a $5.8 million contract that’s designed to help the service tackle one of its most pressing security challenges: integrating thousands of legacy applications into its multibillion-dollar Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (N/MCI) program. The two-year deal with Mountain View Calif.-based Securify Inc. announced last week will give the Navy unlimited use of Securify’s SecurVantage security management product. The goal is to ensure that all of the Navy’s networks comply with the more robust security policies established by the N/MCI contract. Catching up with COBOL Historically things have moved rather slowly in the world of COBOL. But over the last two years IBM has picked up the pace by introducing and then updating a new version of the programming language - Enterprise COBOL for z/OS and OS/390 Version 3 - that includes several new time saving features. Developers using older versions of COBOL may not yet be aware of all the recent advancements available to them. Enter Tom Ross an IBM Software Engineer with more than 18 years of experience in COBOL development. At last week’s SHARE conference in Washington D.C. Ross went before a group of COBOL developers with the goal of bringing them up to date. In this excerpt from that very conference session Ross answers audience questions about COBOL’s new capabilities in the areas of multi-threading XML and Unicode support. SHARE attendees see Linux as mainframe’s future Data center professionals attending the SHARE conference say they’ve been hit hard by the slumping economy and poor job market and while most remain hopeful about the future others wonder whether the current situation is beyond repair. Some of the more skeptical SHARE attendees say they’re less than optimistic about the future because of the roller coaster ride they’ve been on since the late 1990s. Back then thanks in part to ongoing preparation for the Y2K virus and the emergence of Internet companies there was plenty of work to go around. The mainframe job market was competitive and salaries had reached new heights. eTail 2003: Grappling with legacy systems Legacy systems pose a special challenge to retail and financial companies offering services online several chief technology officers agreed during a panel discussion at today's eTail2003 conference here. When one attendee asked panelists for tips tricks or magic for integrating old systems with newer e-commerce front ends Gap Inc.'s Cornell Williams responded Get rid of them. That's the trick touching off peals of laughter from the audience and at least one shout of Amen! Sarbanes-Oxley: Comply With Me The effects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 may ripple throughout your IT organization. Not a public company? You may still have to worry—and even if you don’t you need to learn more about compliance.
Decision-making processes in your company are no doubt a mishmash of manual and electronic steps. Determining who’s responsible for which information and what decisions and making sure the system contains checks and balances to guarantee that those decisions are justified can be a hair-pulling exercise for the most straightforward tasks in business-process analysis. Viewpoint: Rich Mogull Rich Mogull is research director for the information security and risk practice at Gartner Inc. A former paramedic and firefighter Mogull has extensive experience in risk analysis and scenario planning. We asked him to highlight some of the major areas of focus on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for CIOs today. What advice do you give to CIOs today? I’ve been telling them to pay attention and be a bit proactive because you’re going to see what’s going on once your auditors start seeing how you do things. Application Development Market Flattened by Weak E Based on Gartner’s recent report on application development market share (see “2002 Application Development Market Share”) the economic downturn hurt some vendors in 2001 and 2002. These latest financial results indicate that there have been scant signs of improvement during the first half of 2003; most of the AD players posted negative growth in 2002 and lower-than-expected growth in the first two quarters of 2003. Although there is a correlation between the sluggish economy and the performance of software tools vendors not all of these financial results can be attributed solely to general economic and market woes. Software buying patterns have changed significantly during the last two years. Demand-side behavior has changed from a strategic to tactical focus due to financial constraints. Thrift Thrives on Low Tech It’s one of the West’s fastest-growing savings and loans with 119 branches in eight states and $7.4 billion in assets. Yet it owns no automated teller machines. It has no online banking. No voice mail. No “press 3” automated phone system. Typewriters still sit on desks at headquarters and there are only five Internet-connected PCs. Unlocking Legacy Assets: Capitalizing on COBOL Today’s competitive and complex environment means financial services (FS) organizations face tough decisions to modernize their technology infrastructure and take IT strategies to the next level. Organizations are confronted by an ever challenging IT landscape demanding they embrace agility and new service delivery channels to manage change and sustain competitive advantage while at the same time preserving stability and guarding against risk and insecurity. Micro Focus revitalised by legacy revival It is an unsung technology people are passionate about it and its use is growing all the time. Is this some of kind of new mobile device? Or a new software technique fresh from Silicon Valley? Not exactly. These are the terms that Mike Gilbert director of product strategy for Micro Focus uses to describe Cobol the programming language that was first specified more than 40 years ago in 1960 and very shortly after became the de facto standard for programming large computers. |
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