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.
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.
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.
If you are building web services and are looking for an alternative to SOAP and WSDL, RESTful services are something to be seriously considered. REST, Representational State Transfer, was introduced back in 2000 and is gaining acceptance as a lighter weight alternative to SOAP and WSDL based web services.
Although SOAP can be powerful, some feel that it is a bit heavy or verbose for certain applications. Web 2.0 launched REST into the forefront, led by service providers like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and others. RESTful services allow for the creation of HTML based applications using Java Script, XSLT, Ajax, and other non-traditional code based methods without having the formal contract using a WSDL. RESTful interfaces typically also require less development effort and use less runtime overhead.
So if you are concerned about the time, complexity, or overhead of using SOAP based web services, then you should give your brain, and your applications, some REST. If you’re tired of building systems where data needs to be easily combined (mashups), REST can provide the relief that you need. SOAP still has its place in integration projects, but sometimes you just have to stop and take a REST.
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Click to learn how you can use REST to solve your services needs.
Customer testimonials give credibility to the power, usability, effectiveness, value, and many other attributes of a product or company. A good review can often times make a good product great.
How would you like to hear directly from the senior executives that rely on Ivory Service Architect for their mainframe integration projects? Learn from the decision makers why they chose Ivory, how they evaluated Ivory, how they measure success, why they didn’t just pick something free, and the value derived from Ivory.
Steve Craggs, founder of Lustratus research and former IBM Worldwide MQSeries executive, recently interviewed eight Ivory Service Architect customers to learn how and why they chose Ivory, how they are using Ivory and the value derived from using Ivory for their mainframe integration projects. The results have been published in a new Lustratus research paper called User Experiences with Mainframe Integration.
Please join Steve Craggs and our own Rob Morris on October 26th at 12PM EST for a webinar as they discuss the results of Lustratus Research’s latest survey. Rob will interview Steve live over the web regarding the findings of this break-through survey and both will be available to answer your questions.
You should not miss this exciting event! Sign up today for “Mainframe Modernization – Actionable Experience from Real Implementations” and as an added bonus for attending you will receive the research paper free of charge.
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.
In the next IMS Newsletter, due out in the next few weeks, GT Software is featured in two different articles. First is an article by Rob Morris titled “Returns of the Day: Banking on IMS”, and on the back cover the featured “I am IMS” article is on our own Paul Sewell. Rob highlights the long legacy that GT has with IMS expertise and experience and the trust that global customers have in GT to enable their IMS systems as service providers and consumers. GT has been fully integrating IMS with the Ivory Service Architect for IMS customers in many industries around the world. Paul Sewell , the GT Director or Marketing, is a perfect example of the next generation of young professional who “get” the power and flexibility of mainframes and especially IMS.
Look for the IMS newsletter link on the IMS Home Page in the next few weeks and see for yourself why GT Software is IMS, and Paul Sewell is IMS.
I was recently contacted by a customer who started the discussion with “I was looking at this BPMS tool that uses a BPMN 2.0 modeling with BPEL execution to create a business process and I need to include an IMS transaction, how can I do that?” Well after trying to decode all the acronyms in that question I asked him what he needed. They had started using a very powerful tool (ActiveVOS www.activevos.com) and were putting together some very interesting business processes, and inevitably he ran into process that needed information from the mainframe. After researching and talking to the guys at ActiveVOS, we realized that a web service that was created in Ivory Service Architect could easily be included into a business process (as a partner link) into ActiveVOS flows. We created a simple IMS service in Ivory we turned the WSDL over to the designer in ActiveVOS, and in about 5 minutes that flow was invoking the service. We went on to create more complex services in Ivory that involved calling multiple IMS transactions in one service( a mainframe composite service), and again it only took a few minutes before that service was part of a business flow. So, two groups, that spoke their own languages, were able to easily and quickly create business services involving diverse architectures including the mainframe applications.
From that discussion the two companies put together a joint webinar showing how these two products and ideas were easily melded into true business solutions. So now I know that BPMS is (Business Process Management Suite), and BPMN is (Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL is (Business Process Execution Language) and all they need to know is that talking to mainframe is easy via a WSDL in Ivory Service Architect. That webinar is at www.vosibilities.com “Leveraging mainframes for BPM success”.
