Reality Check on Mainframe

As per a survey conducted in 2005 by Ovum1, the mainframe is fit and well. The mainframe is not going to disappear any time soon, nor is IBM’s commitment to it. Brand new MIPS continue to grow by around 15% a year, and the number of lines of COBOL Code in production continue to grow by 3 to 5%.

CICS is the premier teleprocessing monitor on the mainframe. Globally, CICS processes an average of 30 billion transactions per day totaling over $1 trillion – that is, more transactions than the entire internet. CICS is used by 490 of the Fortune 500 firms as well as thousands of smaller companies.

Problem Space

Faced with accelerating changes due to globalization, industry consolidation, growing regulatory requirements, demanding customers, and increasing competition - businesses need to be flexible, efficient and responsive to cope with these changes. Leveraging these mission critical applications as they develop new composite applications.

Although much has been done to make it easier to integrate mainframe based applications with distributed applications, the integration of these two worlds is still expensive.

Solution Space

Integration is the key to achieving the benefits of an agile business . This requires a flexible IT infrastructure that supports a modular and incremental approach, one that works in a heterogeneous environment and provides support for integrated business processes implemented as a collection of linked services. The new paradigm of building future systems is Service Oriented Architecture. (SOA)Web Services are the foundation on which an SOA is built. SOA uses services provided by business components that are dynamically deployed

The new paradigm of building future systems is Service Oriented Architecture. (SOA)Web Services are the foundation on which an SOA is built. SOA uses services provided by business components that are dynamically deployed

SOLA is an interface to CICS applications. It allows CICS applications to participate in Web Services by accepting SOAP requests from the Web and converting them into formats expected by the CICS applications, executing those applications and then converting the results into SOAP responses. Additionally, SOLA provides an effortless way for the mainframe programmer to execute external web services.



SOLA has three major components:

• The SOLA Development Environment
• The SOLA Run-Time
• The SOLA Directory

Hexaware USP

Hexaware with its strong mainframe, and new technology practices is in an ideal position to play a niche role in the SOA space. In conjunction with ‘SOA Software’ developer of SOLA we can help you unlock your legacy CICS assets as Web Services to participate in larger SOA Eco systems.