Best of both worlds

Today's business runs on yesterday's software.

According to generally accepted statistics, 70 percent of the world's business data is still being processed by mainframe applications written in COBOL. It's estimated that 30 billion COBOL transactions are processed daily—more than the number of total Web pages viewed during that same period of time.( 1)

While efficient and reliable, these systems have also become highly complex and inflexible as a result of years of custom-coding to mix hardware and software from different eras and multiple vendors. Additionally, the skills that have maintained and enhanced these bedrock applications are being lost as developers and programmers retire from the work force and take their knowledge with them. The complexity and inflexibility, as well as the looming skills deficit, of legacy systems can hinder the ability to innovate and create new IT solutions that support critical competitive efforts.

Simply ripping and replacing these legacy systems is out of the question. All those lines of code represent a treasure of business logic and processes. IT leaders are looking for ways to leverage and renew the value of these systems by integrating or bridging them into newer and much more flexible ones that can improve the responsiveness and performance of their businesses.

Building bridges with SOA.

One effective bridge between the old and the new is made possible by an application architecture called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is a hot new IT effort and one of the reasons why (among many others) is its value in transforming legacy applications and making them part of a fast and flexible IT architecture.

An SOA solution often utilizes Web services applications that communicate by one application 'publishing' a service so that other applications can 'subscribe' to and use that service, and vice versa. It usually does not matter how the services are implemented for them to communicate. These applications can work together without relying on custom-coded connections. This type of interoperability makes SOA solutions exceptionally well suited for integrating complex, heterogeneous environments with lots of legacy assets.

Using SOA to leverage legacy value reaps a series of benefits. Businesses can use legacy applications and data in new processes, renewing their value. They can also access these assets in real time to support business intelligence and customer service initiatives. IT departments can leverage existing assets to control costs and avoid building ever more complex and costly infrastructures, while at the same time improve interoperability with systems inside and outside of the organization to increase flexibility.

Using an SOA approach also means broadening the applicability of more recent developer skills in newer languages such as Java, XML and other Web services, object-oriented programming and open standards technologies. In fact, SOA may enable programmers with today's skills to work more effectively with yesterdays' systems. A recent story in ADTmag.com story points out that Gartner believes that rather than re-training "a better route, they say, is exposing the business processes in legacy applications, keeping the core of the application intact. That approach allows developers to continue to work with whatever language they're familiar with." (2)

Legacy of innovation. IBM software is built for SOA.

IBM software is helping its customers mine the gold of these long-established infrastructures in two important ways. The first is making sure venerable applications such as IBM CICS® and IMS® and the IBM zSeries® software continue to innovate and support open standards and can expose logic and processes to support SOA solutions. The second is to enable newer software to identify and integrate these assets from the back end and make them part of the component services of SOA solutions.

Every day, roughly 30 billion Web-based transactions, worth about one trillion dollars, move through installed IBM CICS systems around the world.(3) IBM CICS Transaction Server for z/OS® and IBM CICS Transaction Gateway are both optimized for Web services and SOA. CICS Transaction Server provides Web services capabilities while CICS Transaction Gateway delivers the needed Java connectivity. Organizations can easily integrate their business processes and extend existing mainframe-based applications via enhanced Web services and integration capabilities.

IMS is IBM's premier transaction and hierarchical database management system. It was developed over 35 years ago and companies worldwide still depend on it today. IMS solutions are also ready to take advantage of SOA with Web services and other open standards support. "We're providing support for open standards and enabling connectivity to IMS using Web services, thus giving customers network manageability of IMS applications," said IBM's Jeanette Horan in a recent letter to customers in the IMS newsletter.( 4) She is the Vice President of Worldwide Information Management Development of IBM Software Group and General Manager of the IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory where IMS is developed.

IBM middleware, whether it be created for mainframe or other platforms, is part of an overall effort IBM has lead around SOA even before the term existed. IBM has invested one billion dollars in SOA, Web services and related software. More than 70,000 developers worldwide have participated in IBM Web services educational programs.(5) Plus, IBM Business Consulting Services is a leader in service-oriented modeling and architecture consulting. These services are key in analyzing legacy applications to identify and realize services for SOA.

On September 13, IBM announced new software, industry know-how and a partner initiative designed to make it easy for businesses and other organizations to get started with SOA. The IBM SOA Foundation is an integrated, but open, set of software, best practices, patterns, skills and resources to help business get started with SOA. An IBM SOA Reference Architecture provides a method for looking at the set of services that go into building an effective SOA. IBM SOA Industry Accelerators are reusable industry-specific assets leveraging the SOA Foundation, built to accelerate project completion and skills development. The IBM SOA Partner Initiative already has over 100 IBM Business Partners committed to delivering solutions based on IBM's roadmap for SOA.

Old software. New solutions.

A study in 2003 estimated that 80 percent of IT systems were running on legacy platforms.(6) IBM software and SOA solutions are helping businesses and organizations use as much of that 80 percent as possible for business advantage. SOA is becoming a critical key in rejuvenating the value of the stalwart applications that continue to support today's critical processes. At the same time it is providing the type of integration and flexibility that is enabling many IBM customers in becoming an On Demand Business. As the September 13 announcement illustrates, IBM is committed to helping its customers use SOA to achieve business flexibility and to be more competitive and successful in the future, while revitalizing the knowledge and value of the past.

IBM customers use legacy assets in SOA solutions.

BMO Financial Group in Canada uses IBM WebSphere® software in a mainframe environment to unify processes and leverage them across channels. They can quickly deliver new information to improve productivity. BMO has also integrated service channels into the sales process to help boost revenue and profits. Learn more about their legacy transformation solution. Insurance company ACUITY connected communication processes to its core transaction processing systems of IBM CICS running on IBM eServer® zSeries mainframe. As a result, they achieved a $200 million increase in premiums over two years. See how they achieved this and more. Learn how Avis car rental company created a SOA-based infrastructure that grew the Avis brand by enabling new services to be deployed faster through quickly connecting data and business processes.