GT Software BLOG

After dinner I was reading some news articles and catching up with an old mate on a social networking site. This helped me created the title of this article; “Rubbish and IBM specialty engine support”.

One article was from an old friend and one of the best marketing people in the business. The subject of the article was the zIIP specialty engine, which is on the mind of a lot of IBM Enterprise technical managers. Doing more with their Enterprise without increasing costs is a hot subject! The article provided technical insight behind the marketing banter and the truth about offloading work from the IBM General Processor. It reminded me of the design discussions I had with Bob Rogers when creating Ivory’s support for the zIIP environment.

Bob is very pragmatic in his approach to software design; “Just because you can, does not indicate that you should”. Providing absolute numbers on what a client can expect to be offloaded to a specialty engine is an extreme attempt to bolster a marketing position. Common sense dictates that every IBM Enterprise is variable, not absolute. Ever heard the saying “Your Mileage May Vary”?

GT has developed Ivory with “Choice”, as the driving design force. Providing clients the choice of selecting an environment best suited for “Doing more, with less”.  Ivory is the market leader in choice of deployment and IBM specialty engine options for service enablement including:

• z/OS under CICS and as a started
• z/VSE
• Linux for System z
• Linux
• Windows

Ivory is also branded by other software companies to service enable their vendor product environments on the .NET and UNIX platforms.

Ivory’s support for the IBM Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), zIIP and zAAP is unparalleled.  Providing an absolute percentage of utilization offload from the General Processor is nearly impossible and I dare say irresponsible. As my respected competitor and friend so aptly phrased it in his article, 100% of a selected specific execution point in the workload chain can be offloaded to any of the IBM specialty engines. The same is true for Ivory’s support of the IBM specialty engines, there are points along the execution path that would utilize 100% offload to an available specialty engine.

Enterprise environments and requirements change daily, so avoid all the “Rubbish” about what percentage is offloaded to specific specialty engine. Focus instead on the entire development path to insure the Enterprise workload is handled correctly along the entire path.

Products that can adapt to your very demanding Enterprise requirements are a much better factor to consider. Examine the entire workload from; development tooling, runtime deployment environments, standards compliance, environmental adaptability, client extendibility, support options, ease of use/implementation and vendor reputation. Percentage of specialty engine utilization is just another check box for consideration.

My social networking friend is from the UK and one of his recent pokes used the word rubbish, not sure why that inspired this article, but I hope that he enjoys the t-shirts that were sent his way. Now, it’s time to get back to work on the new functionality for Ivory, naturally.

A recent Proof of Concept got me thinking that there might be a “Silver Bullet” being overlooked by our Ivory customers. Ivory Service Architect provides not only SOAP based Web Services, but Callable Services. Callable services were created to provide clients a method for legacy applications to access external Web Services using Ivory projects. Added at the request of a premiere customer, this option provides flexibility when planning new projects, because the process can be prototyped and fully tested using Ivory tooling for web services and then via a simple export function the service provides a simple Callable API interface that can be used by most any COBOL, PLI or assembler programmer without the need to understand the complexities of XML, SOAP or SOA.

Once the Callable Service API is in place, the backend processing for the service can be changed on demand to match business requirements. Several clients have extended their batch and online transaction processing transactions to the “Web Cloud” using Ivory Callable Services. So when the time comes to change vendors in the “Web Cloud”, there is no need to make modifications to their application code, the Ivory “Silver Bullet” (Callable Services Project) is modified and the application is now using a new vendor with no application level impact. Callable Services provides real time “On Demand Processing” for Ivory Clients.

Ivory also provides “Delegate” processing with all the various Ivory project types.  Ivory “Delegates” that are provided by clients or GT business partners provide an interface point between Ivory and any client or software vendor process. So if Callable Services are the “Silver Bullet” for clients, then “Delegates” would be the “Golden Hammer”, because it will allow Ivory to nail down any business interface requirement. Ivory Delegates have been used to extend Ivory into almost any mainframe database, IDMS/DC, Batch Job Submission, EMAIL and even User Written Compression routines.

Why the magic references?  The magic of Ivory allowed us to easily complete the proof of concept mentioned above. By simply adding one Ivory Custom Delegate and a couple of Ivory Callable Services, we were able to exceed the expectations of the client as well as provide the Batch Event processing required.

Ivory Callable Services and the Delegate extensions provide clients with the tooling they need to meet and exceed the ever changing demands of their enterprise.

The approval of the Patent for Ivory is one of those milestones that a lot of companies strive to achieve. Having a great group of very creative developers take a set of ideas created on a plane trip from the UK written on a scratch pad and building Ivory is truly amazing.

Roland Martin –  the co-author of the patent – was very quick to understand the concepts required to build such a great software product. Roland and I hit it off the very first time we together, at the time my role at GT was mainly development, after the interview was over I told the manager of GT Software development we need to hire this guy! But the timing was just not right as Roland accepted another offer before GT could get their offer on the table.

About a year or so later, Roland came back and GT Software management wasted no time in making him an offer, so Roland must have seen something at GT Software he liked as well. Since then we both designed and developed several other products for GT Software.

Enough of the reminiscing about how Roland and I came to work together at GT Software and back to Ivory. After Roland and I worked up more details on the product we discussed the idea in detail with the owner of GT Software. Joe Ganem has always looked forward to next big product for GT and he liked the idea enough to allow me to build a team of developers and invest in creating Ivory.

We started  networking around the office to get leads from our existing staff on who they considered to be a good fit for GTSoftware and the Ivory project. Now after several years of work the GT Software Development Team is very proud that they helped take an idea from the scratch pad to the market.

Several enterprises have adopted the Ivory process for services, ranging from mid-sized insurance companies, large financial and banking institutions —  to the aviation industry.

After seeing such praise in the press about the first GT Software patent, I am honored to have worked at such a great company for all these years.

Thank you to all people that have said such moving words about this accomplishmen —  and to Joe Ganem and the GT Software Development Team that made it all possible.

We will continue to improve Ivory, but we will keep the scratch pad close at hand, for that next idea.

Cheers,

Steve