Mainframe breathes a brand new fresh life. What is this all about? This is about mainframe in come back mode.

The Interview of Ms. Florence Hudson, VP, Marketing & Strategy System Z published in The Hindu Business Line will let you know more about the new life of Mainframe. The Detailed Interview is available at

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2007/01/01/stories/2007010100110300.htm

So, What’s finally happening now? Read on to find out. The below one is the consolidated report from IBM Mainframe.

With a new low-cost model and support for service oriented architectures, IBM is aiming to bolster the mainframe’s appeal for both existing and new users.

IBM is breathing new life into the mainframe with initiatives to woo new users and wow existing ones. But what advantages does the platform offer, and is there a business case for adoption? 

IBM’s initiatives to boost the mainframe include rolling out lower-cost mainframes, releasing tools to help users build service oriented architectures (SOA) on the mainframe, and working with universities to raise awareness of mainframe skills.

IBM has released the third generation of its lower-cost mainframe for small and medium-sized enterprises. The System z9 Business Class mainframe (z9 BC) is priced from about £53,000. Targeted at health care and retail users, as well as other mid-market companies, the z9 BC mainframe can run hundreds of virtual servers, but its power consumption is equivalent to 27 Dell Poweredge 2850 servers, according to IBM.

The z9 BC follows the mid-market z800, which came out in 2002, and the z890 in 2004. “The z800 and z890 have been extremely successful in bolstering the mid-range and giving us a tool to target customers. We hope the z9 BC will continue this success,” said IBM systems consultant Doug Neilson.

Neilson said IBM had gained 200 new customers in the past few years, but declined to go into specifics. He added that very few of the users have moved from another supplier, so most customers are new to the mainframe.

Most of them are consolidating 40 or 50 Unix servers onto a mainframe to run all kinds of commercial applications: from enterprise resourcing planning and customer relationship management, to infrastructure applications like file and print, and web services, according to Neilson.

“In terms of growth, at the end of 2005, that final quarter was 30% higher than the previous year, in terms of raw capacity shipped. The fourth quarter saw our biggest revenues in terms of capacity since 1989,” said Neilson.

Mark Lillycrop, chief executive of Arcati Research, said, “There is still a lot of life in the architecture, and no sign of larger companies moving away. The issue is how to attract more customers (and hence new blood) at the lower end (sub-1,000 million instructions per second), where there is more direct competition.

“This is where the £53,000 z9 BC plays such an important role, as it has brought the entry-level price down to a very affordable level. It also allows smaller customers to upgrade in a more gradual and flexible way than earlier offerings.”

IBM’s new tools to help developers create “services-ready” Java, Visual Basic, Cobol and PL/I applications for the mainframe will go a long way to reviving mainframe investments and bringing in fresh blood, said Lillycrop.

“With the new [web services] tools, IBM is pushing the technical complexity down to a lower level, so that developers’ existing skills can be focused on the business application rather than on the characteristics of the platform,” he said.

This will also help to combat the issue of having an aging and dwindling pool of mainframe specialists in the workforce, said Lillycrop.

“The question should not be how much life is left in the mainframe. Rather, how can organisations with large investments in the mainframe ensure that in today’s agile business world the mainframe is part of a flexible, well integrated IT organisation?” said Stuart McGill, vice-president of marketing at Micro Focus, which specialises in legacy application integration.

The short answer, according to McGill, is the use of SOA and web services, and in IBM’s case these are delivered through its application server platform Websphere, and applications such as CICS – the popular IBM mainframe transaction management system – and IMS – IBM’s database management system for the mainframe.

However, companies will first have to embrace the idea of legacy mainframe extension, said McGill.

“Putting in place the tooling to support this strategy, however, is not something that companies have been quick to adopt, owing in part to the complexity of the mainframe tools to support these initiatives,” he said.

Meanwhile, high-end Itanium-based servers, and mid-range Unix and enterprise grids are creeping in as an alternative to the mainframe for a range of processing tasks.

For the larger enterprises that have invested in mainframes, they will most likely continue to use them, not least because they have a long history of high performance, security and reliability.

Meanwhile, the likes of Sun, with its enterprise grid, and Microsoft, with its Windows Compute Cluster Server, are starting to lure small and medium-sized firms with high-performance computing systems. Although these do not offer direct competition to the mainframe, they illustrate the move away from the mainframe for many processing jobs.

But still with advent of Legacy Integration, Mainframe will live long!!!!

Mainframe Rocks and will always rock the IT World!!!

Scoobert “Scooby“-Doo is a fictional character in the American television animated series Scooby-Doo, about the adventures of four crime-solving teenagers or young adults. Scooby-Doo is a Great Dane belonging to the character Shaggy Rogers. Scooby-Doo and Shaggy share several personality traits, including tremendous appetites and tendencies toward cowardice. Due to their said cowardice, Scooby-Doo, as well as Shaggy, would often have to be bribed by their cohorts (Velma, Daphne and Fred) to go after the costumed villains with “Scooby Snacks,” a biscuit-like dog treat or cookie snack, although sometimes, Scooby Snacks won’t work on Shaggy, so he may get “Shaggy Snacks”.

Scooby has some difficulty with pronunciation, and tends to pronounce most words as if they begin with an “R”. His catch-phrase, usually howled at the end of every episode, is “Scooby-Dooby-Doo!” Don Messick originated the character’s voice patterns, and provided Scooby’s voice in every Scooby-Doo production from 1969 until 1996, when Messick retired. Scott Innes voiced Scooby-Doo in four late 1990s/early 2000s direct-to-video films, and Frank Welker (also the voice of Fred) took over beginning with What’s New, Scooby-Doo? in 2002 and other spinoffs. Neil Fanning provided the voice of the computer-generated Scooby present in the two Warner Bros. live-action feature films.

Within the universe of the show, Scooby-Doo was born on the Knittingham Puppy Farm (owned by Mrs. Knittingham); his “full” first name is Scoobert.

Every one would be familiar with Scooby-Doo and his friends. But what about his relatives???

Here comes his relatives.

Over the course of Scooby-Doo’s various spinoffs, various relatives of Scooby were introduced:

Scrappy-Doo: Scooby’s young nephew (and son of Scooby’s sister Ruby-Doo), Scrappy is the most noteworthy of Scooby’s relatives. Scrappy became a recurring character in the Scooby-Doo series beginning in 1979, and was noted for being quite headstrong and always wanting to face off in a fight against the various villains (unlike his uncle). Scooby and Shaggy were present at Scrappy’s birth. In the first live-action movie, he was portrayed in a negative light, in response to the public dislike toward his character.
Scooby-Dum: Scooby’s cousin, a gray dog. A Mortimer Snerd-esque dog who longed to be a detective. Was rather dimwitted (he’d keep looking for clues even after the mystery was solved).     

Scooby-Dee: Scooby’s cousin, a white dog. Spoke with a Southern accent, and was an actress, even though she was Scooby’s cousin, she acted more like a girlfriend.

Yabba-Doo: Scooby’s brother, a white dog owned by Deputy Dusty in the American southwest. Unlike Scooby’s and Scrappy’s, his typical custom catch-phrase at the end is “Yippity-Yabbity-Doooo!!!”, and not “Yabba-Dabba-Doo!”, due to obvious reasons.

Dooby-Doo: Scooby’s triplet brother, a singer. He is one of Scooby’s few siblings to have hair on his head.

Mumsy and Dada Doo: Scooby’s parents.

Whoopsy-Doo: Scooby’s cousin, a clown. Owned by Norville’s uncle, Gaggy Rogers.

Ruby-Doo: Scooby’s sister, and mother of Scrappy-Doo.
Skippy-Doo: Scooby’s triplet brother. Highly intelligent. He is Scooby’s only sibling to wear glasses.
Howdy-Doo: Scooby’s brother. Enjoyed reading supermarket tabloid newspapers. He appears to become a redhead.
Horton-Doo: Scooby’s uncle. Was interested in monsters and science.

Dixie-Doo: Scooby’s cousin.

Grandpa Scooby: Scooby’s grandfather.

Great-Grandpa Scooby: Scooby’s great-grandfather.

Ancestors of Scooby include Yankee Doodle Doo, who came to Plymouth, Massachusetts aboard the Mayflower with Shaggy’s ancestor, McBaggy Rogers.

Is that all about My Darling Scooby-Doo? This is just a beginning. Keep checking my blog for interesting stories about production history and other Scooby-Doo cartoons and movies.

And Scooby fans, you can join the Scooby fan club at http://www.scoobydoofanclub.co.uk/.

 Charles Schultz Philosophy

The following is the philosophy of Charles Schultz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. You don’t have to actually answer the questions. Just read through, and you’ll get the point.

1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.

 2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.

3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America.

4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize

5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winner for best actor and actress.

6. Name the last decade’s worth of World Series winners.

How did you do?

The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners . Here’s another quiz. See how you do on this one: 1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through school. 2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time. 3. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and special.

The Lesson: People who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones who care .

 “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today.It’s already tomorrow in Australia.” – Charles Schultz

               The recent book which I read was Inocent Man by John Grisham.  Innocent Man is John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller yet.

In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A’s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory.

Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits—drinking, drugs, and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa.

In 1982, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder.

With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row.

If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.

I beleive every one will like this book and more information about Innocent man and other works of John Grisham can be obtained from

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/grisham/main.php 

Enjoy reading books because “Knowing is Evrything“

A word about Mr.Luke Hohmann:

Luke Hohmann is a management consultant who helps his clients bridge the gap that often exists between business and technology. In his past experience, he has played many of the varied roles required by successful software product development organizations, including development, marketing, professional services, sales, customer care, and business development. Hohmann currently focuses his efforts on enterprise class software systems. He is the author of Journey of the Software Professional: A Sociology of Software Development (Prentice-Hall, 1997), which blends cognitive pyschology and organizational behavior into a model for managing the human side of software development. He is also the author of Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions (Addison-Wesley, 2003), which discusses software architecture in a business context.

Now, The Importance of Domin Knowledge. Read On…

The Importance of Domain Knowledge

Interviewer: In your book, Beyond Software Architecture, you write, “The requirement of domain knowledge for a [technical architect] is so strong, that few developers can be promoted to this position until they have considerable experience and skill building systems in the specified domain.” Why is domain knowledge important? Why isn’t good general knowledge about software development sufficient?

Luke Hohmann: In the field of cognitive psychology, there is a tremendous amount of literature that says that domain knowledge trumps technical knowledge in many endeavors, including software. Almost invariably, the ability to make correct decisions about the handling of a given issue in a given domain is based not on technical skills, but on domain skills. I discuss this extensively in my first book, Journey of the Software Professional.

Interviewer: Can you give an example of the importance of domain knowledge in software?

Luke Hohmann: I am working right now with a company that provides analysis tools for engine performance, and driver performance of the engine, because engine performance is partly correlated to how the driver drives it. One of the issues is idle time. If you can lower your idle time, you lower your costs. One of the requirements of our software, therefore, was to measure the idle time of the engine.

I didn’t know how to measure idle time, so I floated an idea to the development team of how we should do it. Other developers came up with some alternative approaches, and we compared these to what a customer had provided. We eventually settled on one, but, before implementing it, we took it to a major customer to see what they thought.

I learned that my approach was wrong, as were the other ideas floated by the development team. It took a customer — an expert in the domain, to tell us “This is how you measure idle time,” and, “This is why you measure idle time this way, because this is the behavior that we want to be able to control.”

For example, should the software measure idle time at a stop light? The developers said, “No, you should have a threshold below which you throw away idle time, because the driver can’t control idle time at a stop light.” And the domain experts in the industry said, “Actually no, you never want to throw any data away. What you want to do is capture all the idle time. As a developer were expecting us to be able to drive idle time to zero. We don’t. We expect idle time to have different values based on the terrain and the climate. We don’t expect idle time to ever be zero.” I like to think of myself as a fairly good developer. I’m strong on the technical side. In this domain I’m weak on the domain side. In this situation, strong technical skills would have implemented a completely wrong domain solution. Thank goodness we triple-checked with a committed customer.

Interviewer: This is another way in which the right way to design something depends on the situation, in this case, the domain.

Luke Hohmann: Absolutely. Let’s leave the business domain out of it, and just look at the technical side. The idioms and practices for programming embedded systems are extremely different than those of multi-terabyte data warehousing. If I’m processing payroll receipts for Safeway, it’s pretty different than building BREW applications on a BREW phone, right? Independent of the domain that I’m servicing, the technical infrastructure of those two kinds of applications is very different. If you are an expert in one, are you by definition an expert in the other? No.

Interviewer: So as a developer, how do you become knowledgeable in both a technical and a business domain? How do you decide where to focus?

Luke Hohmann: The trick is to have enough of a broad base of experience that you can pick the area of technology that you, by interest and skill, are suited to do. In other words, find something that you’re reasonably good at that you also like as an interest. Become skillful in that area. If a team chooses C++, fine, but learn the bloody language. Learn how to use a copy constructor. Learn how to use an assignment operator. Learn the idioms that create high quality C++ code. Then focus on your domain skills. If you’re in real estate, take a real estate class. If you’re in graphic arts, learn how artists use pallets.

As a consultant, I do ask my clients, “What magazines do you read?” And then I’ll read those magazines. I want to learn what they do. How often have you walked into a place and they’re just zinging acronyms back and forth? And your sitting there thinking, “What the hell is a GRB?” Well that’s part of what it means to be a domain expert: knowing what a GRB is.

The person who is an expert both technically and in the domain is a master in both dimensions. In your professional development, you want to zig-zag between them. You want to start with the technical foundation. It’s why you take classes and learn the idioms of C++, or whatever technology you’ve chosen. It’s why you learn how to program safely in C++. And then you start applying that technical knowledge to your domain. As you build experience in that domain, you start to settle in on areas that will be the focus of your career

The story begins….

Heartening…

He met her at a party. She was so outstanding, many guys chasing after her, while he was so normal, nobody paid attention to him. At the end of the party, he invited her to have coffee with him, she was surprised, but due to being polite, she promised. They sat in a nice coffee shop, he was too nervous to say anything, she felt uncomfortable, and she thought to herself, "Please, let me go home…"
 

Suddenly he asked the waiter, "Would you please give me some salt? I’d like to put it in my coffee." Everybody stared at him, so strange! His face turned red but still, he put the salt in his coffee and drank it. She asked him curiously, "Why you have this hobby?"
 

He replied, "When I was a little boy, I lived near the sea, I liked playing in the sea, I could feel the taste of the sea, just like the taste of the salty coffee. Now every time I have the salty coffee, I always think of my childhood, think of my hometown, I miss my hometown so much, I miss my parents who are still living there." While saying
that tears filled his eyes. She was deeply touched. That's his true feeling, from the bottom of his heart. A man who can tell out his homesickness, he must be a man who loves home, cares about home, has responsibility of home… Then she also started to speak, spoke about her faraway hometown, her childhood, her family. That was a really nice talk, also a beautiful beginning of their story. They continued to date. She found that actually he was a man who meets all her demands; he had tolerance, was kind hearted, warm, careful. He was such a good person but she almost missed him!
 

Thanks to his salty coffee! Then the story was just like every beautiful love story, the princess married to the prince, and then they were living the happy life… And, every time she made coffee for him, she put some salt in the coffee, as she knew that’s the way he liked it.
 
 
After 40 years, he passed away, left her a letter which said, "My dearest, please forgive me, forgive my whole life's lie. This was the only lie I said to you—the salty
coffee. Remember the first time we dated? I was so nervous at that time, actually I wanted some sugar, but I said salt. It was hard for me to change so I just went ahead. I never thought that could be the start of our communication! I tried to tell you the truth many times in my life, but I was too afraid to do that, as I have promised not to lie to you for anything… Now I'm dying, I afraid of nothing so I tell you the truth, I don't like the salty coffee, what a strange bad taste… But I have had the salty coffee for my whole life! Since I knew you, I never feel sorry for anything I do for you.
 
Having you with me is my biggest happiness for my whole life. If I can live for the second time, still want to know you and have you for my whole life, even though I have to drink the salty coffee again."
 
Her tears made the letter totally wet. Someday, someone asked her, "What's the taste of salty coffee?" She replied, "It's sweet."
 
Pass this story to everyone because "Love is not to forget but to forgive, not to see but understand, not to hear but to listen, not to let go "

….. And they say guys are Liars;

Courtesy: Bharghava Vamsi Krishna

IBM has announced software enhancements for the System z that it says will make working with the mainframe easier and more relevant in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment

The products are:

• IBM Rational Cobol Generation Extension and Runtime, available now, which allow developers using Java, VisualBasic, PL/1 and Cobol to create SOA-enabled mainframe applications.
• WebSphere Process Server and Enterprise Service Bus, available in June, which connects mainframe data to business processes through an SOA, such as an online credit card purchase that requires checking inventory levels and shipping status.
• DB2 Viper, later this year, to support the z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP), which is a processor designed to help the mainframe support database applications.
• WebSphere Portal 6.0, later this year, which will allow customer employees to see information from different applications on one screen.
• Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, later this year, which will secure transactions across mainframes and distributed computers.

All of them serve the Armonk, N.Y., company's purpose to show that mainframes aren't the hard-to-manage dinosaurs that some still think they are.

Steven Mills, senior vice president and general manager of IBM's software group, said the new enhancements allow programmers to develop software and Web services without having unique mainframe skills.

Some details:

• It can handle up to seven processors, compared to four for the z890.
• It has double the memory, up to 64 GB per server.
• It features 26 millions of instructions per second (MIPS) in a base model, upgradeable to more than 400 MIPS.

IBM rolled out its larger z9-109, now called z9 Enterprise Class, last summer as an upgrade to its predecessor, the z990.But the price tag on that monster starts around $1 million. That is well over the budget of smaller companies that want the benefits the z9 provides but don't have the size to justify it.

The price for the z9 Business Class starts at $100,000.

"It is definitely a small/medium machine compared to a large enterprise machine," said Jim Porell, IBM's chief architect for mainframe software.

The z9 Business Class and Enterprise Class will also be the first to offer a high-speed data processor to help the mainframes process database applications. Called the zIIP, which stands for z Integrated Information Processor, it follows previous processors that IBM has rolled out, the zAAP and IFL, which help process Java and Linux applications, respectively.

Each specialty processor is individually priced at $95,000 on the z9 Business Class. The price on z9 Enterprise Class will remain $125,000 for each processor.

Any mainframe news inevitably includes talk about whether mainframes will survive, or if the so-called x86 servers, lower end machines, will upend them.

According to analyst Joe Clabby, president of Yarmouth, Maine-based Clabby Analytics, this chatter has been going on for decades. In the 1980s, some thought minicomputers would take over mainframes, he said. In the 1990s, and somewhat still today, it was whether company employees would still have the COBOL programming language skills to operate the mainframes.

"Now the big thing is all these PC servers are going to erode the mainframe," Clabby said. "And guess what? None of it is happening. The mainframe is growing like crazy."

Mark Shackelford is director of information services at Fort Smith, Ark.-based Baldor Electric Co., which makes electric motors, drives and generators. Its data center is on the z990, with the company considering an upgrade to the z9 Enterprise Class.

"We run our whole entire enterprise on the z," he said, adding that there hasn't been a failure since 1997. "It has high availability and takes very few people to have to maintain the environment."

Revenue from the System z, however, has seen a hiccup in the last year or so. Following two years of growth in most of 2003 and 2004, IBM saw a slump last year, which it attributed to customers waiting for the z9.

Mainframe revenues did rebound during the last quarter of 2005 but decreased again the first quarter of this year, by 6%. During the same quarter, its total delivery of System z computing power, measured in MIPS, increased 22%, mainly due to its z9 pushing almost twice the MIPS as its predecessor, the z990.

Porell said the midrange z9 Business Class will help sales, as will the unveiling of the package with processors for database crunching, and Java and Linux applications.

Modernization means revising existing legacy applications so that they can leverage today's new software technologies as part of an enterprise architecture. Once these applications are modernized, they should offer the flexibility, robustness, programmer productivity, and access from across and outside the enterprise that today's new applications typically provide.

One technology offers particular hope for modernizing cost-effectively across all enterprise platforms is Web services. However users who are prototyping Web services implementations must pick the right targets, because there is no money to waste on failed or long-running projects.

The answer is to target existing mainframe business-critical applications first. Modernizing an existing mainframe enterprise resource planning (ERP) or order-entry application maximizes the positive impact on the bottom line, while minimizing the costs of providing new e-business features. Web-servicizing these applications simplifies the existing e-business architecture, cutting administrative and development costs.

Where ever  possible, these applications should be upgraded in place.They should be modified on the mainframe rather than migrating them to a new platform.

Choosing the right approach

Today's enterprises typically consider four strategies for integrating new technologies with their existing mainframe application suites:

Upgrade in place. The program and its data are kept on the mainframe, and the developer applies mainframe tools that integrate the new technologies with the mainframe application.

Migrate. The program's source or binary code is moved to another platform with little or no change, and the developer applies tools on the new platform to add the new technologies. Note that the application's data may be moved to the new platform as well, or may remain on the mainframe.

Regenerate. The program is first reverse engineered, a process that creates an abstracted design model of the application. The application is then regenerated from the design model on the new platform. The new technologies are either embedded as a result of the regeneration process or added once the application is up and running on the new platform (again, the data may remain on the mainframe or can be moved to the new platform).

Replace. IT discards the existing application and writes an entirely new one, on the mainframe or a new platform. The new technologies are "designed in" to the new application. The new application supposedly incorporates at least the same functionality as the old.

In the past, enterprises tended to choose a replacement strategy if a new technology had to be added; otherwise, they simply left the application as is — the risks of changing a business-critical application in any way were seen as so great, and the difficulties of changing it so daunting, that anything was preferable to touching it at all.

However, over the last five years, three new trends have become apparent that have changed the relative merits of these four choices significantly:

Tools for migration have become applicable to so many mainframe applications that the majority of these applications are now migrateable.

The total cost of ownership savings and business benefits of both non-mainframe platforms and Web-servicized mainframe platforms have increased, making the idea of leaving mainframe applications "as is" less and less tenable.

The tools, middleware, and services necessary for upgrading in place, and especially for Web-servicizing on the mainframe, are now available and field-proven.
The costs and risks

IT often fails to understand the costs and benefits of mainframe application modernization.

The net result of the as is strategy has been a constant increase in the following inventory costs of legacy applications:

Maintenance costs — especially those costs associated with outdated applications about which key information has been lost and whose software and hardware is no longer adequately supported.

Opportunity costs — those costs incurred as maintenance spending crowds out new application development and packaged application spending.

Inefficiency costs — those costs incurred as the failure to proactively upgrade causes crisis-mode, costly application fixes; periodic directives to move to a new platform; and wasted time and effort on flawed or failed major software improvement projects.
These costs often feed on themselves in a vicious circle. Choosing to maintain instead of improve an application means that the application continues to age, thus not only increasing maintenance, opportunity, and inefficiency costs, but also increasing the gap between the legacy application and current technologies. This age gap, in turn makes improvement more costly — which in turn makes the organization more likely to choose the "as is" strategy.

Now consider the replace strategy. Superficially, this seems more attractive than ever, with an ever wider array of packaged applications to choose from and with ever greater benefits from the new technologies such as Web services baked into the new applications.

However, because the application to be replaced is mission-critical, the new application must at least support the features of the old, and preferably the old business processes. Meanwhile, the old application, because of decades of the "as is" strategy, lacks documentation, experts, and cultural willingness to move forward. As a result, replacement by a new application can involve loss of features, inadequate support for business processes, and cultural resistance that will prevent implementation — and when the application is business-critical, its replacement can be business-threatening.

Moving the application to a new platform by regeneration or migration, can offer clear advantages. Research by Infostructure Associates personnel shows that some medium-scale IT shops that have migrated their applications from mainframes to Wintel platforms are seeing TCO savings of up to 67%, plus significant increases in price/performance and flexibility. These improvements are primarily due to lower acquisition and software license costs of the Wintel.

Migration, in particular, also offers extensive, automated tools for handling conversion of COBOL, FORTRAN, and DB2-based applications — although CICS and assembler-based applications are less well supported.

However, the risks and costs of moving key mainframe applications to Unix or Windows can be large. Mainframe applications, especially those highly tuned for performance, are often so customized for the mainframe that they cannot simply be copied from one machine to another; instead, those migrating the application must have a deep understanding of the application's code and purpose. In some cases, migraters must rewrite much of the code in the application to run and deliver optimum performance on a very different type of computer — which could take months or even years. As a result, performance-critical applications may not perform adequately even after tuning; and new errors may creep in during the process, making the resultant application unusable.

Often, the application's documentation, or IT's knowledge of the application, has been lost or is inadequate. While automated migration tools can handle some of these cases, these tools fall short in many cases.

Regeneration, likewise, is hard pressed to abstract to a design in cases where structured programming techniques were not followed in the first place (a common flaw of mainframe programs) and where no documentation exists to deduce the underlying design.

For mainframe applications sharing a common data store, migration or regeneration is even harder, if not impossible. If the data for one application is moved to a new platform and database — perhaps to integrate with applications on the new platform — then the applications remaining on the mainframe will need modifications in order to access their data from the new database, or application code must be written to keep the two databases in sync.

Scaling the migrated application likewise is often difficult. Today's application servers, although superficially similar to traditional mainframe TP (transaction processing) monitors, aim at load balancing across application code, not transactions. As a result, mainframe applications that scale well using mainframe TP monitors, such as IBM's CICS and Unisys' COMS, will usually require extensive adaptation to scale on Linux/Unix using Apache or JBoss, or in Windows using Microsoft's application server.

Typically, regeneration is used much less than migration, because the process requires greater application knowledge and regeneration is perceived to be applicable to fewer applications.

Hence, Upgrade in place makes sense

The key watershed in showing that upgrade in place is feasible was Y2K. Implementation of Y2K made it clear that even mainframe applications hitherto thought untouchable could indeed be modified successfully at a very low level in the code. Moreover, upgrading mainframe applications in place is more feasible than ever before, because upgrade tools are better.

As a result, a large number of mainframe applications have been Web-servicized, or are in the process of being Web-servicized. In other words, the attractiveness of upgrade in place by Web-servicization is being proved in the real world.

Why are we so particular on web services???

The potential of Web services

Web services allow IT departments to make a legacy mainframe application available not only to the entire organization, but also to a global customer and partner base of millions. The Web service's ability to provide one service for multiple front-end types of clients — end-users via the Web site, in-house application, or cross-organization solution — allows more rapid development of changes to the mainframe application that are available to a broad range of users. The Web service's ability to invoke other Web services such as security, business compliance, and personalization, makes the mainframe application more feature-rich. Web service information, stored in a repository, gives administrators a common software-asset information base to monitor and troubleshoot the enhanced mainframe applications.

These technical advantages also lead to broader business benefits — lowering the cost of doing business, allowing companies to achieve much greater efficiencies by using their mainframe business-critical applications more effectively, and giving the organization greater ability to quickly adapt to changing conditions.

Criteria for an upgrade solution

IT buyers should emphasize the following criteria in choosing an upgrade-in-place solution for either Web enablement or Web servicizing:

Comprehensive functionality. The solution should include extensive middleware that provides a powerful software infrastructure so that developers upgrading the existing application can easily integrate powerful new capabilities. The middleware should support old and new technologies, as well as the upgrade process. The middleware solution should include a full range of new technology "standards" such as .Net.

Services. The upgrade-solution supplier should provide mainframe-experienced and new-technology-savvy consultants and systems integrators to aid upgraders and train IT in upgrade best practices.
Flexibility. The solution should handle undocumented mainframe applications and allow easy addition of a wide range of Web/e-business features.

Low risk. The upgrade solution should draw on long experience with mainframes to detect and minimize dangerous changes to the application, such as changes to the schemas of an underlying database.

Programmer productivity. The upgrade solution should support tool sets from the supplier and/or third parties. The middleware should provide powerful APIs so that e-business functionality can be rapidly added.

IBM Mainframe Web Services Development and Software Evolution Solutions IBM offers a large set of mainframe-software legacy modernization and Web-servicization tools and services. The primary tools, offered under both the Rational and WebSphere brands, are development and upgrade tools based on the Eclipse open source framework, which provides standards-based flexibility and third-party tool integration.

WebSphere Developer for zSeries (WDz) adds to Rational Application Developer mainframe-development and existing-application-upgrade functionality that allows users to prepare typical existing/legacy software for inclusion in composite applications that integrate business processes effectively. WDz also includes support for Web services and JCA connectivity to multiple versions of CICS and IMS, as well as visual modeling and flow-generation support for the CICS V3 Service Flow Feature. IBM WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) adds workflow and business integration functionality to allow creation of new composite applications that integration with existing application functions and Web services. WID includes native support for WS-BPEL4WS-compliant processes and a range of process integration and ESB capabilities.
The advent of the Internet has had a mainframe-application effect directly opposite of what one might expect. Instead of increasing the attraction of migrating performance-critical and similar existing applications, the Internet makes it easier for enterprises to Web-enable and Web-servicize in place, adding cost-effective Internet connectivity and application deployment with minimal impact on the enterprise's production environment. Mainframe users should, therefore, look either for upgrade-in-place capabilities in an overall development solution or for a separate upgrade toolset to allow cost-effective reuse of the existing software portfolio in any development project.

IBM's extensive mainframe development and legacy-application modernization tools, and its software for security and other Web-service needs, make it a logical choice for users seeking to get full value from a business-critical or mission-critical mainframe application