Solutions for Web Services/SOA

The vast majority of Florida’s Miami-Dade County’s core enterprise applications reside on a mainframe, and that platform’s ability to handle enormous transactional volume has served the county well over the years. Now it is using DataDirect’s Shadow z/Services to wrap existing mainframe logic into ready-to-use web services deployed within a J2EE portal environment. By integrating with web services, the county expects to reduce the costs of managing its portal by more than 25 percent. Bridging the gap between the mainframe and more modern computing platforms, DataDirect has enabled Miami-Dade to respond rapidly to the evolving needs of county employees, businesses, and individual taxpayers—2.6 million residents in all.

Miami-Dade has discovered what mainframe-based organizations the world over are beginning to realize: that the inherent reusability of web services within a standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) can allow them to deploy new services in a faction of the time and cost required using traditional point-to-point integration.

Protect Your Legacy Investment

Mainframe legacy systems:

• Represent considerable investments of time, effort, and expense.
• Provide a time-tested code base that is extremely reliable.
• Form a mission-critical infrastructure that underpins business operations.

For these reasons, organizations want to leverage them in new applications as much as possible without assuming the risks involved in tampering with their intrinsic programming.

DataDirect’s web services/SOA solutions offer a non-invasive development approach that protects your proven legacy logic.

• Your legacy business assets are transparently transformed into services that can be used and reused by your Java or .NET developers using their existing tools and skills.
• We don’t ask you to retrain, retool, or change the way you build applications.

Bi-Directional Web Services Open Up Business Opportunities

DataDirect’s Shadow web services/SOA solutions are bi-directional and not confined to only publishing mainframe data sources as web services. Within the comprehensive SOA facility are capabilities for consuming web services that reside on distributed platforms external to the mainframe.

Besides providing the means of making mainframe data, programs, or screens available as services for use by distributed computing applications, artifacts generated by a distributed platform can be made available as services for use by applications running on the mainframe.

Miami-Dade County, for instance, is piloting the use of Shadow z/Services Consumption for important tasks such as receiving Homeland Security terror threat level updates from external web services into its mainframe, information which in turn is reused as simple mainframe utilities by law enforcement agencies.

Let DataDirect Help Your Organization Be More Responsive to Changing Business Requirements

If you have a mainframe-based environment and you’re looking to make your organization more responsive to changing business requirements and more productive in building new applications, DataDirect’s Shadow product suite can offer you a web services/SOA solution that will more than meet your needs.

Mainframe platforms supported include:

Data: Adabas, DB2, IMS/DB, CA-IDMS, VSAM
Application Business Logic: CICS/TS, IMS/TM, CA-IDMS, Natural
Applications Presentation: CICS/TS, IMS/TM, CA-IDMS, CA-Ideal, Natural

For more in-depth information, consult the following white papers:

To speak with an expert about how you can take advantage of all the benefits offered by the service-oriented development environment, please call 1-800-876-3101 or complete a Request for Information form and an account executive will contact you.