A typical question I receive in customer / prospect meetings centers around Mainframe SOA. There is still confusion in the marketplace about the role the mainframe plays in an organizations SOA strategy. Consider the below scenarios. They are both quite common. Your Mainframe SOA strategy will differ greatly based on how you view your company. The below is my summary of a message Dale Vecchio, Gartner, lectures to the Gartner client base about this very topic. Scenario 1: If your mainframe is an important piece of your enterprise architecture, and you have mission-critical applications and databases running the business on the mainframe -- this is an easy question. The mainframe should play an instrumental role in your organizations SOA strategy. The mainframe should be both a Web service provider, as well as a consumer. Organizations that fit this category will find that embarking on the service-enablement of valuable transactions will create many reusable business services. These services will in all likelihood become the MVP's of your Web service repository.Scenario 2: If your mainframe is in essence a nursing home to dying applications, and is not a viable part of your enterprise, it will play a reduced role in your SOA strategy. SOA can be the right methodology to migrate some of your mainframe workload to other platforms. At the same time, it also allows you to expose the relevant and valuable pieces of your mainframe application, business and data logic as business services. This will allow you to maximize the value of the platform and provide options on how you use these mainframe applications in the future.Both of the above are common, and depending on which scenario your organization identifies with, a different strategy for Mainframe SOA emerges. Brian
Post new comment