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COBOL Technology
Technical PerspectiveGoogle Code Search adds support for 11 additional languages The Google Code Search team has just announced support for AppleScript COBOL ColdFusion Haskell Modula-2 Modula-3 OCaml R Rebol SML and VHDL. You can select them on the advanced search page or with the lang: operator. Other languages are supported with a bit more work:
If your language of choice isn't on there you can still search for code written in that language. Just use the the file: operator to restrict your search to files with the right extensions. For example you could restrict your search to files with a .zz extension with a query like:
foo file:\.zz$
New products reduce IT cost risk at SA bank Financial services group Nedbank has made a substantial investment in Micro Focus mainframe products following an extensive evaluation conducted with the support of local Micro Focus representative MigrationWare.
Over the next months MigrationWare will be working with Nedbank to integrate 150 seats of Micro Focus’s Mainframe Express products into its information-technology (IT) development environment and assist in the training of the bank’s IT systems development community in the best use of the products. The Mainframe Capacity Conundrum: Getting Better All the Time
It’s no wonder mainframe shops have embraced z/Linux J2EE and other next-generation workloads out of necessity. After all IBM Corp. prices z/Linux and z/WebSphere capacity at a fraction of the cost of full-blown z/OS capacity (for COBOL and Assembler applications) so—on paper at least—it’s a no-brainer: that switching (where possible) to next-generation workloads can result in large savings.
Some mainframe vets take the opposite view however. As far as they’re concerned Big Blue’s next-generation push is actually a Big Iron bait and switch What’s not to like about cheap mainframe workloads? For one thing skeptics argue z/Linux and Big Iron WebSphere can’t husband system capacity and resources as efficiently as z/OS TPF VSE and other traditional mainframe operating environments. Organizations save money in the short term but end up paying more in the long-term by purchasing bigger more powerful mainframes. This shouldn’t and doesn’t disqualify IBM’s next-generation push however.
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.
Language of the dead? COBOL: A rock-solid platform for large-scale processing or an old language running dangerously short of programmers able and willing to work with it? Our story on the Tax Office's IT Change Program has provoked shots from both sides. News flash: Cobol is not dead. Cobol PL/1 and other outdated languages are still widely used on Mainframes and many of these applications make use of web/GUI front-ends. Back-end databases like DB2 IMS and even Oracle are enormously powerful in these environments and these outdated languages are *designed* for business programming - which the majority of flavour-of-the-month languages such as Java C++ C# .NET etc struggle to do.
Service Oriented Legacy Architecture - MF meets SOA
The biggest stumbling block delaying wholesale SOA implementation is the plethora of existing systems that do not provide an SOA interface. Should they be re-engineered to create a web services interface or can an interface be created by wrapping or indirection? Nowhere is this problem more pressing than on the mainframe because: The many existing mainframe transactions should provide a rich seam of useful services. The average CICS COBOL program does not understand the alphabet soup of web services.
The owners of these transactions are justly proud of their reliability performance and security and are wary of distributed applications and programmers accessing them directly. Merrill Lynch met these requirements by creating a tool that analyses the COBOL source of a CICS transaction not just the copy books and from that can identify its inputs and outputs and therefore the signature of the resulting Web Service(s). As part of this process the developer has the opportunity to tailor the Web Service in a variety of ways such as publishing the service using more intuitive variable names than those chosen by the COBOL programmer. When completed the tool automatically creates the WSDL and publishes it in a UDDI directory.
The New CIO: From Information to Innovation and Survival -CIOs/COBOL
Most mid- to large-size companies have a CIO but very few have a CIO. Let me explain.
We know the CIO as the Chief Information Officer. He or she owns the corporation's IT operation infrastructure budget staff mission and the gaggle of headaches that comes along with it. In the heyday of the IBM mainframe systems running COBOL code on OS/MVS or VSE we knew this person as the MIS Director.But times change. CIO over the last five years gradually has taken on a new meaning: Chief Innovation Officer. This new CIO is fundamentally different from the typical C-level manager. The key is that the Innovation Officer works not in the business but rather on the business. The difference is enormous.
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.
Noble intentions but can government IT strategy deliver its shared services vision?
In the Cabinet Office at Admiralty Arch in London on 2 November John Hutton then a Cabinet Office minister parried questions from journalists about the publication of the government's new IT strategy. One question was whether there would be improved oversight by parliament of any high-risk IT projects that arise from implementation of the strategy. The questioner pointed out to Hutton and his colleague e-government minister Jim Murphy that public spending watchdog the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee investigate fewer than 1% of high- and medium-risk IT-related programmes in the public sector. Hutton replied The more public scrutiny the better. But he said there were no specific plans for greater openness: that was a matter for parliament. So it is against the background of continued secrecy and infrequent reporting to parliament on the progress of IT projects that Hutton Murphy and the government's chief information officer Ian Watmore announced a series of measures to among other things bring together government IT-related activities under the shared services initiative. One meeting has already been held with suppliers about possible future contracts and a further series is planned. 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.
Agitator aims to shake up lumbering world of software development
Applications development has always been one of the most contentious issues in IT. Computers exist only to run applications after all and those applications come from one of two sources - you make them or you buy them.In the early days of computing people mostly wrote their own applications in languages such as COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) PL/1 (Programming Language One) and RPG (Report Program Generator). But as the industry matured it began to make more sense to buy off-the-shelf programs from software suppliers. Many people regard the internet as the biggest IT development of the 1990s but equally important was the switch from applications developed in-house to those bought from software vendors. Companies such as SAP and PeopleSoft (bought by Oracle) became software powerhouses on the strength of this.But there is something of a shift back to applications development as organisations look at ways to swiftly develop new applications to respond to changing business demands.
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.
What Are Hosted Applications? As access to the Internet becomes more widespread with faster more reliable and 'always on' connections becoming the norm the growth of applications using the hosted application model continues to expand.
Although hosted applications will not suit every situation or every customer they offer many individuals and organizations as well as the application manufacturers' themselves considerable benefits over the locally installed application.A hosted application also known as Internet-based application web-based application online application and Application Service Providers (ASPs) are software applications where the software resides on servers that are accessed through the Internet instead of the more traditional software that is installed on either a local server or on individual PCs.
Small players in the big field
Budget carriers slash costs by playing IT their way. They rely on single-vendor solutions pay-per-use services and avoid the standard industry partnerships.On paper low-cost airlines fit the profile of a nimble organisation quick to respond to market forces. Just from the IT perspective they don't have the complex legacy systems that fill the backroom of traditional carriers or need to maintain pricey specialised integration and customisation works.But the reality is real business benefits come largely from having economies of scale which budget airlines don't have at present as governments refuse to open up their skies to foreign carriers.Besides limited destinations low-fare airlines are also struggling to make money in the face of rising fuel costs. Starting with the merger of two Singapore-based no-frill carriers Jetstar Asia and Valuair in July a continued market shakeout across the region won't be too surprising.
IBM User Group President Warns Of IT Personnel Shortage
The public sector will be particularly hard-hit he says. One increasingly popular solution he suggests is for ITers to retire and then return as consultants to new posts that are more interesting and less stressful. In spite of great gains in automating IT installations hands-on expertise is still needed. Rosen said for instance that the ancient COBOL software language remains in great demand although it is often viewed by younger IT people as representing a bygone era of computing. SHARE is promoting some new training and educational programs designed to improve careers of people already working in IT. Some educational programs are aimed at enticing young people to enter the field. “People like to say that COBOL is dead ” said Rosen. “But an amazing amount of software is sitting out there in COBOL.” Other older IT solutions like OpenVMS and CICS remain vibrant although their demise had been predicted years ago.
COBOL-to-Java Translation Tool Eliminates Code Rewriting The federal student loan service center Campus Partners an offshoot of Sallie Mae wanted to revamp its mainframe systems to make loan data accessible to customers via the Web. With millions of lines of complex mainframe code written in the 1980s and a staff of experienced COBOL programmers who had worked for the company for many years Campus Partners faced a challenge. Campus Partners handles accounting billing and bookkeeping for a huge volume of student loans and in doing so follows literally thousands of government rules and regulations. Over the years it has built reams of complex business logic into its code. “We have a 20-plus year-old legacy mainframe system written in COBOL and baseline assembler ” says John Elliot the firm’s director of IT.
CONFESSIONS OF AN IT DINOSAUR IN THE BEGINNING
When the dinosaurs left this world they literally disappeared. Except for a few bones scattered here and there they left no records of the dominance they once exerted. During that time there was no creature more fearsome than a dinosaur. Man was but a plankton in the dinosaur’s ocean a mere dot in the dinosaur’s world. Yet the dinosaurs left nothing but bones. That is the fate IT dinosaurs aim to escape. When we disappear (if we do) from the IT world our stories will hopefully remain.Most in the IT world call us IT dinosaurs because we work with the biggest and oldest computer - the mainframe. We code programs using the most ancient of computer programs - COBOL..Mention the phrase “COBOL mainframe” to a group of young IT professionals and students and chances are 99% will cringe. The image COBOL mainframe invokes is that of a balding programmer desperately clinging on to a dying industry.
IBM pulls open source license
Just because we say it's open source doesn't mean that it is IBM has extended support for a development tool after users cried out against the company mothballing it and revoking its open source status.The controversy revolves around the Cgidev02 tool which is part of IBM's Easy400 software suite for the iSeries that lets developers web-enable software written in COBOL or RPG. Despite labelling the product as open source and stating that it complied with the official Open Source Criteria the vendor doesn't specify on its website which of the more than 70 open source licenses governs the product. Users who download the free tools are never presented a license either.
Lift and Shift Migration Puts One Platform in Play
Canadian insurer opts off the mainframe to embrace an open platform. In the late 1990s when insurance firms were running high loss ratios (from 110 to 130) Lombard Canada Ltd. one of the oldest property and casualty insurance operations in Ontario hired a consulting firm to assess its underwriting and claims leakage while it sought to improve IT and drive down expenses. With the firm's help Lombard's loss ratio started dropping. While other Canadian firms were still grappling with hefty loss ratios Lombard moved on to major technological decisions.
Terminal-emulation market is not in terminal condition.
So says Zvi Alon CEO of NetManage Inc. in Cupertino Calif. Alon continues to pocket cash by selling 3270 5250 and other hoary terminalemulation programs. Companies are buying them in the tens of thousands all the time he says. That's because when companies upgrade their desktop machines they generally need new software including terminal emulators. The so- called webification of Cobol-laden mainframe applications hasn't hurt his business a bit Alon says claiming that barely 5% of mainframe apps can be accessed by a browser. 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. IBM opens AlphaWorks technology to universities
IBM has launched a new program to provide university students and faculty free access to nascent technologies on its alphaWorks site. The goal of the Academic Licensing Program says Marc Goubert manager of IBM's alphaWorks group is to train educate and build a loyal base of future developers on emerging technologies and open standards. We want to spur innovation from universities and our future software engineers Goubert tells ProgrammingTrends. We want to provide students and faculty with new software concepts that wouldn't necessarily be taught otherwise. We feel that working with faculty giving them some of these emerging technology concepts will help us to build a firmer base and a more innovative software developer generation to come. Legacy Integration Tools Driven by SOA In the face of Gartner figures that show the high cost of turning a Cobol programmer into an object-oriented developer integration vendors offer a different solution. A better route they say is exposing the business processes in legacy applications keeping the core of the application intact. That approach allows developers to continue to work with whatever language they’re familiar with. With an estimated 200 billion lines of Cobol code still in use worldwide the treasure trove of business processes stored in so-called legacy applications is golden—and something that corporations want to find better ways of mining. The growth of SOA is a big factor pushing companies to look at ways to access the business processes buried in mainframe programs and to do it without rewriting those programs in other languages. Legacy Integration Tools Driven by SOA In the face of Gartner figures that show the high cost of turning a Cobol programmer into an object-oriented developer integration vendors offer a different solution. A better route they say is exposing the business processes in legacy applications keeping the core of the application intact. That approach allows developers to continue to work with whatever language they’re familiar with. With an estimated 200 billion lines of Cobol code still in use worldwide the treasure trove of business processes stored in so-called legacy applications is golden—and something that corporations want to find better ways of mining. The growth of SOA is a big factor pushing companies to look at ways to access the business processes buried in mainframe programs and to do it without rewriting those programs in other languages. 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' [QuickLink 55070] where Northrop Grumman Ship Systems CIO Jan Rideout cautioned against expectations of big maintenance cost savings by moving applications off a mainframe. The vast majority of business data still resides on Cobol-based systems (70% is a widely accepted figure) and it's silly if not irresponsible for anyone to marginalize that fact. As much as the vendors with a vested interest in mainframe-bashing would love to see that old code vanish it's just not happening. COBOL skills needed in the future
To paraphrase German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche COBOL is dead. Or at least that's what some people in the IT world believe. It's a legacy language with relatively little new development taking place. But the growth of the mainframe of late combined with the staggering amount of COBOL running currently has some experts are questioning whether the 800-pound gorilla is really dead. So Rockville Md.-based Micro Focus International Ltd. decided to poke it with a stick to find out. According to preliminary results of Micro Focus' survey of 750 mainframers in the U.S. and Canada 41% name COBOL as a principal programming language by an approximate 25% margin over Java the next most popular language. Preliminary results also find 52% of mainframe applications are still written in COBOL. 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. C# offers an easy-to-use alternative to Java
C# is a programming language from Microsoft designed to work with the .net Framework. It is seen as Microsoft's response to Java which in many ways it resembles. Microsoft broke with long- standing practice with C# by inviting developers to contribute to the language; by getting it ratified by a standards body; and by making the source code available so that versions for other platforms such as Mac and Linux could be developed. The C# Language Specification describes it as a simple modern object-oriented and type-safe programming language derived from C and C++ . C# offers an easy-to-use alternative to Java C# is a programming language from Microsoft designed to work with the .net Framework. It is seen as Microsoft's response to Java which in many ways it resembles. Microsoft broke with long- standing practice with C# by inviting developers to contribute to the language; by getting it ratified by a standards body; and by making the source code available so that versions for other platforms such as Mac and Linux could be developed. The C# Language Specification describes it as a simple modern object-oriented and type-safe programming language derived from C and C++ . 'Applistructure' important task for firms says AMR
The merger of enterprise applications with underlying infrastructure will be one of the most important tasks for companies to complete over the next two years according to analysts AMR Research. AMR has termed the requirement as applistructure . The analyst said demand for applistructure is being driven by Web services and SOAs. To deliver applistructure an integrated and complete set of applications and infrastructure are established. The components may come from different suppliers but are managed and guaranteed by a single one. DHL parent untangles 'spaghetti infrastructure'
Warnings abound about spaghetti code especially in legacy COBOL programs but Michael Herr senior director of IT at Germany’s Deutsche Post says watch out for spaghetti infrastructure. Spaghetti infrastructure as Herr describes it consists of things like a proliferation of point-to-point interfaces developed for one-off projects that are the antithesis of service-oriented architecture (SOA). The problem with spaghetti infrastructure is while one application may speak to second it takes a whole lot of coding and testing to extend the conversation to a third application.
iSeries EXTRA: Processing XML Documents with COBOL
XML is fast becoming the preferred format for data interchange in today’s e-business world. Leveraging this technology is something of keen interest to iSeries COBOL shops. Let’s explore how COBOL applications can work with XML. A first step is to choose a location for the XML documents. On the iSeries server the most likely source for XML documents is the IFS. Compared to the QSYS file system the IFS space provides more flexible advantages in terms of file format and the CCSID encoding. When parsing XML documents with COBOL you have a couple of options. IBM’s XML Toolkit for iSeries (5733-XT1) which contains the XML for procedural parser is the obvious and simple choice. In essence the parser provides a set of APIs for procedural languages such as COBOL and RPG to interact with the underlying XML parser. Envisioning the Programming Language of the Future
What will be the dominant programming languages a decade from now? Microsoft Corp. developer division architect Herb Sutter told attendees of the OOPSLA conference here that he couldn't predict the names of the most prominent programming languages of 2014 but he had a good idea of the characteristics of those languages. Sutter said the top future programming languages will blend existing concrete languages with virtual platforms. They will likely include garbage collection (even if only as an optional feature); security and verifiability; the ability to be optimized; and an easy and scalable way to manipulate large quantities of external data. Fair Isaac Extends Support of Mainframes with Blaze Advisor for COBOL Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor for COBOL ensures rules management solutions can complement and upgrade existing mainframe applications Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC) the leading provider of analytics and decision technology today announced the general availability of Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor for COBOL. COBOL - Common Business-Oriented Language - is a common programming language that is found at the heart of many of today's leading organizations' mainframe 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. 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.
Oracle opens up (just a bit)
Oracle’s JDeveloper 10g is an IDE in the broadest sense of the term. For the majority of Java application development projects the developer or architect will never have to leave the JDeveloper environment to get the job done. JDeveloper successfully integrates the tools needed to create not only Java apps but to develop (and in several cases to visually or declaratively develop) UML XML JSPs HTML EJBs and Swing interfaces. The IDE also provides connectivity to various Java app servers SQL databases via JDBC SOAP servers and a host of other data sources. Essentially any of the secondary tasks that one might find a need to perform during the phases of planning development testing deployment and maintenance of a J2EE J2SE or J2ME app are integrated in some fashion in JDeveloper.
Jetson offers path to a 'gentler Java'
DataSource Inc. Greenbelt Md. doing its part in the quest for a 'gentler Java ' has brought out Jetson an application development toolset that officials said can help non-Java programmers to develop J2EE applications thus making those difficult EJBs easier to use.
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.
Cobol is ticking but how long? BANGALORE: Is old tech warrior Cobol or common business oriented language dead or lost in the Web? The aging Cobol the yesteryear's dominant programming language may be a 'thing' of past for today's techies but it is still alive and serving its customers from the back-end of many corporate networks.
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.
Integration and the far horizons of flexibility Virtually every financial services firm has invested in some form of middleware over the years with the hope and expectation that could extract a few more years of business life. The middleware investment was badly needed after the heavy investment in the late eighties and nineties on mainframe systems. These systems have now moved on into a legacy architecture that survives today.
Meeting the demands of business This should be a plaque on every IT person's desk as this is what the business wants. However we need to unpack this to see what business is really asking for. Business is asking for three things: deliver IT without fuss give the business results for IT spend and give good strategically aligned IT leadership.
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.
Who will win the Web services war? Technology battles have long been a feature of the IT industry. Most IT managers will remember the LAN wars -- Ethernet .vs Token Ring -- and the bus wars -- Industry Standard Architecture .vs Micro-Channel Architecture. In both cases the eventual winner was the least proprietary solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
SOA breaking down reusable-code barriers
Experts say the current surge of interest in service-oriented architecture (SOA) represents a major breakthrough in the longtime quest among IT managers to reduce the amount code developers need to write while increasing the sum of existing code that can be reworked for new applications.
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.
Integration of legacy systems is vital to effective customer service The survey of 100 IT directors in UK businesses commissioned by legacy IT integration specialist WRQ found that legacy IT systems are critical to providing customer service - 86% regarded legacy systems as essential to customer service delivery.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
'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.
The Bloor Perspective: Trojan horses legacy systems and IBM's new clients Trojan horses threaten to defraud home PCs users when accessing online bank accounts and e-tail sites or simply to steal their identities. The actual level of such activity is unknown and probably very high if the level of identity theft is anything to go by. Trojans as you probably already know are spyware - they open back doors into PC and can send what they discover direct to a hacker.
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
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.
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.
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?
Circuit to Packet Migration: A Transformational Change in Telecom The migration of the telecommunications network from circuit to packet technologies will be transformational not evolutionary. As such it could be disruptive if not managed carefully. For the past 100 years development of the telephone network has focused on the reliable delivery of simple voice calls. But that single-focused world is now disappearing as service providers begin to cope with the complexities of voice over IP and IP-based services.
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.
Requirements raise fears of voters being turned away
Critics see potential problems under HAVA and the state’s reaction to it. Basically they fear that eligible voters will be denied their right to cast a ballot – intentionally or not.
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 Alliance Intended To Drive Mainframe-To-Windows Migrations
Microsoft and Micro Focus International have teamed up to enable mainframe customers to seamlessly migrate their data to Windows platforms. In a prepared statement the companies said the alliance provides the technology foundation for moving mainframe workloads to more modern Intel and Windows-based servers using .Net.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Borland readies apps deployment tool
Looking to smooth the transition between application development and deployment Borland on Friday will introduce Borland Deployment Op-Center for application lifecycle management. The infrastructure software is intended to help businesses control costs manage change and increase reliability in IT operations the company said. Op-Center automates the manual processes of deployment configuration and control the company said.
Mainframers debate merits pain of offshore outsourcing
Dozens of IT pros responded passionately to a pair of recent Search390.com Face-off columns in which two TechTarget editors debated the trend among U.S. companies of farming out technology work to contractors overseas. Most said that it's a matter of national pride and that companies should fight to keep jobs within U.S. borders even if it's less expensive to hire elsewhere. In the long run they argued avoiding offshore outsourcing will strengthen the country both by improving the economy and by ensuring that a greater number of Americans maintain their high-tech skills.
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?
Open-Source Model for Outsourcing
It doesn't take an MBA to know that you can save money paying a salary of $20 000 for IT skills in India vs. $80 000 in Indianapolis. That's why the outsourcing movement now encompasses software creation not just support and maintenance. According to a Meta Group study 41% of all new application development whether involving Cobol .Net C# or C++ is happening offshore.
Legacy and Web Aps Integrated
Electric Insurance is a national writer of personal insurance established 35 years ago to serve the needs of General Electric employees. The company now offers home auto and umbrella policies to the general public in all 50 states. Traditionally the company directly wrote insurance policies for GE employees and those referred to the company by GE. Over the past six years however the company began to expand its marketing efforts. We were one of the first to provide auto quotes over the Web said Steve Coyne manager of information technology at Electric Insurance. You can walk through the whole process and buy online. The company has also partnered with many Web-based insurance and rating services.
Advice to Mainframe Users: Upgrade to an iSeries
In a brief trip down memory lane Tony Madden Avnet's vice president of sales recalls Years ago when I was still at IBM I ran a seminar called 'Replace Your Mainframe with an AS/400.' It was effective too. We actually converted a number of mainframe customers to the AS/400. Madden now has a chance to relive history — but it's unlikely that he'll have IBM's backing this time.
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.”
Java Can't Take the Place of Cobol
Lucas Mearian's article IBM Pushes New Bank Apps [QuickLink 43037] presented a balanced look at the challenges facing banks as they seek to expose Cobol legacy applications to contemporary platforms and it's correct that replacement costs are prohibitively expensive for most companies. However a few items are worth mentioning beyond the high cost of replacing core applications with Java-based applications.
Migrating Legacy Applications with Microsoft Virtual Server
We all have plenty of reasons to procrastinate and many of us had a good reason for prolonging the migration process from Windows NT—application incompatibility. If my NT applications can't reliably run on a Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 system then I'm better off addressing the known concerns of running these programs on NT and planning for periodic reboots than tackling new problems associated with a new OS. Although some companies can replace or upgrade legacy applications to facilitate a migration other organizations don't have that luxury and must maintain legacy OSs to support needed applications.
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.”
Tools Cater To Leveraging Legacy Cobol Apps
It seems that Cobol applications never fade away. Mainframes still run about 60 percent to 80 percent of business applications according to research firm Gartner which adds up to billions of lines of Cobol code integrally tied to enterprise systems. The problem facing corporations: It takes time and money to leverage those legacy applications for use with new Web-based software infrastructure.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
Hurdles Abound In The Path To XML Integration
Despite the cries of XML gurus about how easy it is integrate applications using XML CRN Test Center engineers disagree and instead believe achieving a pure XML solution is a difficult task. The proliferation of XML standards has opened the doors for solution providers who are integrating and streamlining enterprise systems but the flurry of new techniques has created a complex web of access methods that have made the work largely inaccessible to mainstream developers.
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.
iSeries’ changing colors
Quick! Do you know which platform can concurrently run multiple operating systems including multiple Linux and Windows servers; execute your Web services and J2EE strategy; integrate with .Net; and host Web applications and data warehouses with ease? The answer might be already sitting in the corner of your datacenter crunching on code. Michael Williams vice president of information systems at O’Reilly Auto Parts calls it “IBM’s best kept secret”: iSeries the chameleon of server platforms capable of filling nearly any role in the enterprise including running the entire shop.
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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 Outsourcing again in Indiana When companies consider out-sourcing of AD efforts they often do ‘very simple math ’ Gartners’ Joseph Feiman told attendees at this week’s AD Summit in Los Angeles. While he agreed that beleaguered state-side AD managers will move more work outside the organization Feiman said a sophisticated analysis of skills issues is needed in order to achieve the goals behind the drive to outsourcing. Off-shore out-sourcing can be good he said but managers should also contemplate ‘on-shore’ out-sourcing. Overseas shops can surpass the U.S. in some areas of technology development but they lack the in-depth knowledge of the actual business that states-side corporations display. And in some cases language can be a barrier. Sun’s initiative designed with developers in mind Sun Microsystems’ official launch of its new software initiative at last week’s SunNetwork conference saw the Santa Clara Calif.-based network computing company eschewing point product releases in favor of a unified quarterly upgrade schedule for six systems that integrate some 225 separate products. The firm also implemented an aggressive new pricing scheme. The heart of the initiative is the Java Enterprise System (formerly code-named Project Orion) while the darling of the show was Java Desktop (formerly code-named Mad Hatter). 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. 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.
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. New Tools For Coders The open-source software tradition hails from inside the walls of IT. Corporate developers have long understood the programming advantages they get from being able to read distribute and modify source code through the development process and beyond. But the tools for managing the code need to change to match our distributed work world. Tools developed for LANs are just not as suited for geographically dispersed development environments as newer collaborative development software nor do they have the new tools’ file-sharing revision-control and Web-based issue-tracking features. 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. Modernize Your Mainframe After three decades of innovation miniaturization and acceleration the mainframe remains a viable platform for high-volume enterprise applications. If trends continue companies servicing 5 000 users or more worldwide will retain their investment in this technology well into the next decade. For many companies the biggest issue isn’t whether to buy more big iron it’s how to capitalize on the mainframes they already have. But there must be something that says “I’m risk-averse” about data-center managers because apart from tactical moves such as jettisoning tape administrators consolidating licenses and off-loading systems management to third parties many companies have been reluctant to apply innovative initiatives. 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. 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. |
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