Comprehensive solution enables rapid creation and deployment of Web services using existing enterprise mainframe applications
ATLANTA, October 4, 2004 – GT Software, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise mainframe integration solutions, today announced the release of Ivory Web Services. Ivory is an innovative new product designed and written from the ground-up as a Web services solution that complies with Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) standards. Ivory provides the power of a programmatic solution without the programming, for rapid, cost-effective development and deployment of Web service applications. With Ivory, developers can include legacy applications into their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Ivory allows companies to graphically generate Web services for mainframe applications and data, and consume other Web services.
"A service-oriented architecture is quickly becoming the standard for extending legacy applications into new, more modern application architectures", said Dale Vecchio, research director at Gartner, Inc. "Reusing existing, working applications as services provides a great starting point for any organization building composite applications to meet new business needs."
The Ivory Web Services solution has two components: Ivory Studio and Ivory Server. Ivory Studio is a PC-based development application that lets organizations graphically create and publish Web services from existing mainframe assets. The Ivory Studio includes an integrated test environment for validation and testing of the Web service. Ivory Server is a high-performance Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Server for seamless Web service deployment. The solution enables enterprises to generate Web services and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) without the long development time and high costs associated with writing new programs.
The Ivory solution solves a critical issue facing today's enterprises: how to integrate mainframe applications with Internet-based services, said Joe Ganem, president and CEO of GT Software. ?Ivory Studio and Ivory Server provide the answer, enabling businesses to preserve their investment in mainframe resources while leveraging new efficient and cost effective Web service applications.
"Ivory provided us with a graphical method for building and generating five Web services from five CICS programs in less than two hours, and they worked the first time," said Sheldon E. Jeames, a programmer analyst with the State of Alabama Department of Finance Information Services Division. "Given current business realities, re-writing all of our mainframe applications to take advantage of Web services is not cost effective. Ivory gave us a way to utilize our existing resources while generating new Web services without breaking the bank."
Using Ivory Studio's graphical user interface (GUI), developers can easily transform standard mainframe business functions into Web services. Unlike other mainframe Web services products, Ivory Studio provides a non-programmatic way to generate Web services for the mainframe, through its modeling environment, which allows developers to generate diagrams that define the business flow of a Web service. The server receives SOAP requests and invokes the business rules previously defined in Ivory Studio to satisfy the request. Ivory Server provides SOAP support via HTTP and HTTPS protocols. Ivory requires no special skills or understanding of SOAP, XML, WSDL or HTTP protocols, only a working knowledge of existing mainframe applications. Developers can learn how to use Ivory in less than a day.
GT Software is a leading provider of enterprise application and data solutions that integrate mainframe data and applications into client/server and Web applications using ODBC, JDBC, J2EE and Web services. Our solutions provide a complete, flexible, and non-programmatic foundation to leverage more value to enterprise systems and applications, and to take full advantage of today's Internet technologies.
GT Software has over 2,000 installations worldwide, and provides high-quality, innovative and cost-effective solutions for many Fortune 1000 companies. Founded in 1982 and headquartered in Atlanta, GT Software is a privately held company that is currently represented in the U.S., Canada, Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa and South America.
