Holmes describes a typical customer environment, which involves an average of five and often seven core applications, all of which utilize separate IDs and password authorization, and many of which identify the same customers with different key numbers. In some situations, the user is even forced to manually correlate these customer key numbers, perhaps with the aid of a spreadsheet. A portal, such as the kind created with Jacada Integrator, "sticks a veneer on top of all of that," Holmes says. "As an employee, you fire up your desktop, you get one view into your world, you enter one ID and password, one menu of the applications you need to use, [for] opening up an account or checking the status of a check or payment."
For one call-center customer facing a 40% annual turnover rate, operators were spending up to 12 weeks to learn their application and eight weeks on top of that to achieve full productivity, Holmes says. An Integrator-based portal was able to slash that time and reduce training costs by 40%. Again, this positively impacts both the administration and operations elements of TCO reduction.
Managing the mainframe environment is no longer about migrating to a smaller platform and less and less about camouflaging a tired legacy investment. The new management framework for mainframe computing is adaptation. As mainframes become more flexible platforms, companies may find themselves leveraging their legacy investments in untraditional ways, adapting them to serve new purposes in a changing IT landscape.
The purpose of Web-services software is to expose 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.
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. Although most products in the Web-services category are designed for deployment on the middle tier (think of middleware), some are designed to be installed on the mainframe itself. The result for some customer sites is the elimination of the middle tier, at least insofar as custom applications are concerned.
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