Enterprise modernization: Exploiting the value of your IT investments, unleashing the value of your business

From The Mainstream – Business journal for the System z community

Mainstream 32 - 21 Oct 2008

Your mainframe systems and applications are fundamentally in place to support, and especially enable, the core processes of your business. In this way, they deliver information that is crucial to your business operations, whether it’s business insight to internal users, logistics data to supply chain partners or customer-oriented information to an external audience. And that information is contained in probably millions of lines of code within your business applications. Your investment in that code, those applications and your systems is likely significant.

Are you investing in IT, or investing in the past?

The applications at the heart of most enterprises have been developed over many years and modified countless times and often by many different developers. As a result, many organizations find themselves depending on a quagmire of complex and sometimes inflexible applications and processes. In addition, skill islands and team silos aren’t conducive to effective communication, productivity and resource allocation.

There’s good reason that CEOs worry about their business agility. IT organizations are often limited in their ability to quickly respond to business requirements due to a rigid architecture and systems that have evolved over years. These legacy applications often house compartmentalized business processes, along with duplicate information and redundant functionality, sometimes due to mergers and acquisitions that can also derail the development environment. Legacy environments also call for seasoned developers with COBOL and other dwindling skill sets, when today’s workforce is packed with a new wave of developers that focuses more on Java, Web 2.0, Web services and other technologies. These developers are in high demand for delivering new workloads and new business value.

Maintaining these assorted, disjointed systems is expensive. There is the built-in cost of the foundational technology plus the labor overhead of maintaining and updating hand-built code and patchwork systems. Plus, investing in legacy, siloed applications means that reinvesting in a fixed, outdated operational strategy, rather than more powerful, flexible IT solutions that can optimize business operations. With demands for new products and services, integration with business partners and customer applications, global support for outsourced applications and other factors, businesses are at a crossroads.

Modernizing the enterprise

Many businesses want to move their enterprises from complex, inflexible, multiple IT systems to flexible business processes across a manageable set of IT systems residing on open, fully integrated platforms such as the mainframe. They also want a software development platform that can accelerate traditional mainframe development and support Web enablement of their mainframe systems so they can deliver modern, cost-effective workloads for the mainframe. To put it simply, there’s a desire and trend to modernize.

The popular approach is using service-oriented architecture (SOA) to extend the value of existing mainframe assets, rather than risking time and expense in replacing them. Modernizing offers much improved ROI on technology investments, along with better service to customers today. SOA also prepares businesses for future challenges without taking on the risks associated with a replacement approach. In fact, in the SOA Spending Report 2007-2008, AMR Research notes that 53 percent of companies worldwide have already begun their migration to SOA and 37 percent will begin SOA projects over the next couple of years.

There is no single best way to modernize, yet an incremental approach toward modernization works best for most companies wanting to minimize risk. By leveraging SOA technology and zeroing in on the following focus areas in your modernization plan, you can establish the flexibility and interoperability required to optimize and maintain current applications, deliver new workloads and meet business needs:

Assets – Reuse and transform your proven legacy application assets by identifying the business rules embedded in core business processes. Restructure usable code, remove dead code and create reusable, valuable components that can be enabled as services within your SOA.
Architectures – Modernize your architecture and increase your flexibility to move to new technologies. Use tools that allow developers to easily create mainframe applications that can take full advantage of the Web, Web services and XML-based technologies integrated with, or even within, existing CICS and IMS environments.
Skills – Leverage tools that enable a platform-independent model for developing cross-platform applications, while bridging the gap between seasoned developers and those with newer skills. Then, the entire team has the ability to improve current enterprise applications and take advantage of the new architectures and technologies.
Processes and infrastructures – Synchronize activities relating to software development, management, quality and release, and manage your System z development along with other platform development. Use tools and middleware that help automate and enforce development processes, and enhance productivity and collaboration across multiple operating platforms at every stage of the application life cycle.
Investments – Redirect IT staff and budgets to pursue new opportunities by adopting an integrated, open, modular development platform so you can modernize and optimize application delivery across the enterprise.

Delivering modern, cost-effective workloads for the mainframe

The mainframe is still the workhorse of big business. More commercial transactions are processed on mainframes than other platforms, and an estimated 200 billion lines of COBOL code run on mainframes today with several billion lines of code added annually. This broad usage can, however, result in a slew of complex and isolated enterprise applications, making it difficult for organizations to produce the flexibility needed for development environments and resulting business processes.

The convergence of mainframe technologies and SOA strategies can liberate your core business assets by making it easier to enrich, extend and reuse them well beyond their original scope of design. At the same time, this gives you the capabilities to develop, test and deploy new workloads to System z servers based on new and emerging technologies. Ultimately, this convergence can offer a modern software delivery platform that supports combined COBOL, PL/I, Java, Web services and many other types of development. By supporting a broader array of technologies, you’re more likely to attract and retain mainframe developers. With a robust application development environment — one that brings together old and new skill sets and technologies — you can continue leveraging the affordability and high availability of the mainframe.

End-to-end capabilities for modern, SOA-based design

IBM offers robust coverage for the mainframe environment, delivering business-ready capabilities that allow companies to leverage the mainframe as an integral component of SOA. IBM enterprise modernization solutions for System z help organizations evolve core IT systems toward modern architectures and technologies. These prescriptive tools, methods and techniques can help you accelerate the development and execution of the most appropriate modernization strategy for your business.

IBM has recently announced several new tools and middleware offerings that support enterprise modernization and SOA in the System z environment. IBM Rational Developer for System z V7.5 can help expedite and boost efficiencies in traditional mainframe development, Web development and integrated SOA-based composite development. COBOL, PL/I, C, C++, High-Level Assembler and Java developer communities can also function more productively.

Closely associated with Rational, IBM WebSphere Application ServerV7.0 simplifies the development environment and makes it easier to develop business applications deployable on a wide variety of platforms including z/OS and Linux on System z. WebSphere Application Server for z/OS offers a better server experience by integrating closely with z/OS capabilities transparently to the business application. Two IBM specialty engines, known as zIIP and zAAP, make it more cost-effective to process new applications on z/OS without the awareness of the applications.

For businesses that use applications from the open source communities or considering it, IBM offers the WebSphere Application Server Community Edition V2.1, a Java EE 5 server for building and managing Java applications on Linux on System z. The solution enables a more manageable server environment through consolidation while taking advantage of the System z qualities of service.

Business solutions commonly span a variety of platforms and execution environments, so an important aspect of SOA is comprehensive and effective connectivity. IBM WebSphere MQ for z/OS V7.0 provides a Universal Messaging Backbone for SOA-based solutions, connecting over 80 platforms including z/OS and Linux on System z. Recognizing that the movement of files is still a critical aspect of any effective business solution, IBM now offers the WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition, making managed file movement an integral part of the solution.

The new CICS Explorer offers a common, intuitive, Eclipse-based environment for architects, developers, administrators, system programmers and operators. The Explorer provides an integration point for the CICS Transaction Server, CICS Tools, CICS Transaction Gateway, Problem Determination Tools and Rational Tools, providing teams with a practical, integrated working environment.

Energizing your development environment, optimizing your business

Companies are searching for new ways to integrate existing systems for a powerful IT environment that can deliver new workloads for new business possibilities, today and tomorrow. The SOA design framework and enterprise modernization can help companies achieve rapid and low-cost system development, while allowing IT departments to be significantly more responsive to business demands. Businesses with mission-critical applications running on the mainframe can benefit from developing and deploying new applications and housing their SOA workload on the mainframe. By doing so, they can exploit all the benefits the mainframe has to offer—including performance, availability, security and scalability—in migrating to SOA and delivering their new application development projects. When you seize the full value of your IT investments, you can do more than improve business operations. Ultimately, you can unleash the true value of your business.