Coming off a very successful gig at the House of Blues in Vegas, the band is taking the show international. On November 14 – 17, GT Software will be heading to Konigstein Germany to both exhibit and present at the IBM IMS Technical Symposium.
On Tuesday morning, Don Spoerke will present “Fast and Easy IMS Modernization and Integration”, highlighting how Ivory can provide simple to sophisticated integration solutions for IMS without coding or hassles. Then, on Tuesday night, the GT House Band will co-host a Rockin’ the Mainframe party with IBM. If the 1000 or so people in Vegas are any indication, jeder wird eine gute Zeit haben. The band will be giving out the highly sought after Rockin’ the Mainframe shirts. Click here for more information.
I have seen things in Las Vegas that I have never seen anywhere else. But the “Sin City” has its good side too. Take next week for example. GT Software will be heading out to Las Vegas for the IBM Information on Demand Conference at the Mandalay Bay.
Drive innovation and business optimization with the best in technical and business education.
Choose from three technical forums that give you in-depth education including hands-on labs and usability sand boxes, and the thought-provoking forum for Business Leadership.
Information Management Forum
We are heading back down to Orlando next week for the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2011. The theme for this event is Re-imagine IT: Leading from the front.
Join 7,500 senior IT executives – including 2,000 CIOs – at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2011 and come away with new ways to:
- Re-imagine a business structure in which information users are simultaneously creators and consumers
- Re-imagine information technology through a process of “creative destruction”
- Re-imagine the evolving role of the IT department as a whole
GT Software will be participating in the IT Solution Center. Come visit us at Booth 634 and see the latest offerings from GT Software.
Learn more here.
Over the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to see what a lot of different organizations are doing to create mainframe web services. Something that just baffles my mind is how many people are creating web services by hand coding them…..and think that it’s the only way.
You must be kidding me? I didn’t think people actually wrote code for anything anymore. Heck, even COBOL, that “ancient” language has tooling to generate the code for you. So why are you still coding your mainframe services?
Deep breathe, stop ranting. Good. Let’s get back to web services, one of the more recent things to come to the IT world. Certainly, there would have to be a slick interface for creating these web services. There must be a better way. NEWS FLASH — THERE IS! If you want to create simple or complex SOAP, REST or JSON services without writing any code, you must explore Ivory Service Architect from GT Software. Web services of any level of granularity, done. Our customers have quit coding and so should you.
I can’t think of anything an organization has that is more important than their data. We spend so much time and effort making sure it is up to date, clean, and secure. But data isn’t information if it is impossible to get to. I can’t even begin to tell you how many folks I’ve talked to that are frustrated by not being able to get at mainframe data in a timely or cost effective manner. Sure, we have data warehouses, data marts, extract files and a myriad of other custom solutions. Imagine having to ask a developer to write a COBOL program to grab some data from a VSAM file, write it to a flat file, FTP to somewhere else, load it into another database……then it’s ready to use. WOW! How long did that take? How much did that cost? Is the data even relevant anymore? Was it worth it?
It doesn’t need to be that hard! Imagine your Excel spreadsheet, Crystal Report, web app, or other application pulling datafrom any mainframe database in real time. Imagine the data being minutes old, not hours or days. Imagine being able to get the information yourself and not rely on others.
We know where your data is, we know how to get to it, and we certainly know how you can get to it too!.. Click here to learn how you can make mainframe data access quick, timely, and cost effective.
Being called a champion is a great accomplishment. But when you can say you’re the two-time or back to back champion, it sets you apart from your peers. Congratulations goes out to our own Dusty Rivers for being name IBM Champion for the second year in a row by IBM for his innovative leadership within the data management community. An IBM Champion is an IT professional, developer or educator who leads
and mentors those in the IBM technical community and helps them make the best use of IBM solutions and services.
“On behalf of IBM, it is with great pleasure that we recognize Dusty as a 2011 IBM Champion,” said Beth Flood, IBM Champion Program Manager. “Thank you for your leadership and contributions to the data management community. You continue to be among a very small group to be chosen for this recognition.”
Rivers, a Principal Technical Architect for GT Software, has an extensive 33-year background in global mainframe systems integration…
Read the full press release here.
JavaScript Web Designers Can Now Easily Integrate with the Mainframe Using Ivory Service Architect
ATLANTA, June 20, 2011 – GT Software, a global provider of mainframe integration and data access solutions, today announced that its flagship product, Ivory Service Architect, now supports JSON as an option for web service processing. 
“This latest enhancement makes Ivory Service Architect easier for developers to use, and opens the door for JavaScript web designers to access the IBM mainframe — enabling more people than ever before to leverage mainframe applications and data,” said Wes Young, Senior Vice President of Sales for GT Software.
“This reinforces Ivory Service Architect’s position as the most cost-effective, flexible mainframe integration tool on the market today.”
Read the full press release here.
Yes, those immortal words take me back to a high school stage in 1978 when life was easy and I really didn’t “pay no mind” to the words being sung. Irving Berlin may not have really known how those words would ring true even today, but I digress.
The possibilities for a play on words here are just too easy. But seriously, what isn’t that easy is trying to take Natural applications and integrate them with modern web applications. It’s just plain hard. Adabas data access can be difficult too. Fortunately, GT Software is also doing what comes naturally and that is making integration easy by extending the powerful capabilities of Ivory Service Architect to also include inbound and outbound web service enablement for Natural applications and Adabas data.
If you have Natural applications that need to call web services, or if you want to web service enable your existing Natural apps and data, give GT a call. You can also view a rebroadcast of our last webinar titled “Boost Development Initiatives with Native Access to Natural / Adabas“ or read the full press release here.
IBM VM (Virtual Machine) is an operating system created by IBM that runs on IBM Mainframe Systems. VM provides the virtualization technology that enables multiple copies of operating systems to run as GUEST Operating Systems (commonly referred to as GUESTs) on a common physical hardware platform. VM provides a robust virtual computing platform. The motivating factor behind virtualization technology is realizing huge economies of scale as we will see later on discussion of z/Linux.
Originally released in 1972 as VM/370 because it ran on the IBM/370 mainframe. VM/370 ran a re-implementation of CP/CMS System. CP/CMS has several previous versions including CP-40/CMS and CP-67/CMS. VM/370 was based on a CP-370/CMS. The CP (Control Program) piece is the hypervisor used to share computing resources of the physical hardware and CMS is a User Time-Sharing and Editing environment. Simply put, CP/CMS is the administrative and user environment of VM.
z/VM is the current implementation of IBM’s VM and run on all of IBM latest Mainframe Systems including the z/10 and z/Enterprise Systems (z196). The z/VM Hypervisor CP (Control Program) provides the mechanisms for sharing hardware and software resources that enable virtualization in z/VM. A series of CP commands and scripting can be used to provide the virtual environment with which the GUEST operates.
z/Linux is a complete implementation of Linux on System z. Linux implementations for the IBM Mainframe were developed in labs over a period of late 1998 and early 1999 with a commercially available package available in 2000.
Using a combination of z/VM and z/Linux, a customer can literally run thousands of Linux GUESTs on a single IBM Mainframe platform. As mentioned earlier in this article the user community can realize tremendous economies of scale by establishing a Many to One relationship between the z/Linux GUESTs (MANY) to a common physical hardware platform (ONE). IBM Mainframes have a specialized processor called an Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) to handle the z/Linux workload. The real beauty of IFLs is that they run at Uniprocessor speed (Full Throttle) and are NOT “knee-capped”) as are the General Processors (GPs) used for running other mainframe workload. With z/Linux, the customer is not hassled with providing commodity based hardware platforms that may only provide a ONE-for-ONE environment.
The market for z/Linux is rapidly expanding and maturing. Production, Development and Test/QA environments have found real relevance for z/VM and z/Linux.
R. Scott Ray
Enterprise Systems Director
Hear Rob Morris “Shoot it Out” with other CICS Web Service vendors and learn how Ivory Service Architect from GT Software will help your organization drive value while containing costs.
SHARE 2011 will be held in Anaheim, CA, February 27th – March 4th, 2011. The theme of this year’s show is Driving Value While Containing Costs. Rob Morris, Chief Strategy Officer for GT Software, has been invited to speak at the session titled “CICS Web Service Vendor Shootout.”
Rob, along with other CICS vendors, will discuss the use of web services tooling for mainframe integration versus what is offered by IBM. Rob will stress why having choices for how services are developed, what can be included, how the services are called, and where the services are run are critical to maximize your investments while containing costs. He’ll also highlight that Ivory Service Architect includes support for IBM specialty engines which will definitely impact the total cost of an integration framework. To support Rob’s message, he will include testimonials from GT Software customers that have enhanced the value of their mainframe while containing costs. As Chief Strategy Officer for GT Software, Rob has written articles for many industry publications and is a frequent presenter at SHARE and key IBM events.
“The CICS Web Services Vendor Shootout” will be held in Room 205B of the Anaheim Convention Center at 3:00PM on Tuesday March 1, 2011. More information on the SHARE conference can be found at www.share.org. For information on how GT Software can maximize the value of modernizing your mainframe investments while containing costs, please visit www.gtsoftware.com or call 404-253-1300 to speak to one of our Integration experts.
