A thought on how the current techniques like Mashups and Web 2.0 can be applied to integrate the mainframe based legacy systems with other enterprise IT systems and Web to address the pain that enterprises face today with legacy system, and to derive most benefit out of the integration.

  In today’s world of computing, there are more transactions processed by Mainframe systems than by the Internet in its entirety. Around 30 plus billion transactions are processed in Mainframe daily worldwide. Mainframe system stores wealth of data. Around 75% of world’s business data is processed on Mainframe. As part of application transformation, many a times we think of legacy migration. Is it practical to move data and function of this size out to a new platform ensuring same degree of speed, stability and reliability? We need to retain legacy but it needs to be integrated well with the rest of the enterprise system to meet IT demand of business.Current integration techniques are not sufficient. There is a need to explore better integration mechanism like SOA, Mashups and Web 2.0.

 The problem with current legacy integrations: Mainframe system traditionally has limited networking capability and does not support rich GUI. Today’s business witnesses lots of acquisition and merger and in this case, it becomes difficult for mainframe to participate in IT consolidations because of its limited networking capability. This leads to a situation where business functions and data present in mainframe are not available to other business portfolios. This causes redundant functionality in the IT system, increased cost of maintenance and more time to market.  Organizations have successfully integrated the legacy system with other platforms and web, but most of them have used the conventional integration techniques. Most of them use non-open standard protocols. The contract breaks when there is a change either on the host side or on the interface side. So they are not adaptable and extensible to a changing environment and future needs in a B2B collaboration. The point to point connections increase complexity of integration when the number of application increases.  Web 2.0 uses open standard connectivity based on RSS, REST and ATOM. It uses the SOA as the backbone for interconnectivity. So there is no scope of contact breakage like the case of point to point connection. Because of the open standard connectivity, SOA is adaptable to a changing environment and is not locked to a specific vendor. The integration is well managed even if the number of participating application increases.

  Web 2.0 and Technology behind it: According to O Reilly, Web 2.0 is a concept. It is a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.  According to him, there are seven salient features which define whether a system is a web 2.0 system or not. See link http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html. More than technology open collaboration and participation defines web 2.0. There is no specific technology for Web 2.0.

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (1 vote)

Reply