DataDirect Technologies' Shadow RTE Product Enables Advanced SOA Implementations for Mainframes

September 25, 2006; 05:57 AM
DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), today announced the proliferation of advanced service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments by a number of Shadow(R) RTE customers and mainframe users.

Sometimes referred to as SOA 2.0, advanced SOA entails the merging of SOA and Web services interoperability with other architectural types, most notably event-driven architectures (EDA). Moving beyond Web services to include event notifications and enterprise-class computing environments, users experience a more agile and responsive IT infrastructure capable of achieving what Gartner, Inc. defines as the Real-Time Enterprise - an enterprise that allows businesses to more effectively compete by using up-to-date information to progressively remove delays to the management and execution of its critical business processes.

Mainframe SOA Leader

DataDirect Technologies is an innovator in SOA enablement for the mainframe, providing through its Shadow RTE mainframe services bus, an integrated software architecture supporting both Web services and real-time events, in addition to its support for direct SQL access and Web enablement. According to Gartner research vice president Dale Vecchio, advanced SOA enablement involving mainframes provides customers with an opportunity for increased business agility.

"The addition of real-time events to a Web services based Service Oriented Architecture, has applicability to organizations with heavy investments in mainframe technology. Web services have already begun to accelerate legacy re-use and re-position the mainframe as an industry standard server. Given the transactional nature of mainframes - one that is rich in business meaningful events - the combination of mainframe events and mainframe Web services for advanced SOA enablement provides the additional benefit of a real-time foundation for increased business agility."

Gartner, Inc., Dale Vecchio

Customers of DataDirect Technologies that are already utilizing the combined benefits of Web services and real-time events for advanced SOA include the 17th Circuit Court of Florida, the state's second-largest judicial district and Kansas City Life Insurance Company, a firm that insures more than a half-million policy holders in the United States.

Events in Motion

The 17th Circuit Court of Florida selected the Shadow RTE product and its Shadow z/Events(TM) component to maintain real-time data consistency between distributed databases and mainframe systems supporting its new judicial information system. Without touching application code, the Shadow z/Events component provides the court with a complete facility for merging the real-time capture and publication of changes that occurred within the court's VSAM mainframe database to enable secure, streamlined integration of XML-formatted legacy data with a distributed relational data warehouse. The new real-time judicial information system brings together advanced elements of SOA, leveraging Web services and real-time events with modern advances in data warehousing.

"Our goal was to create a real-time judicial (case management) information repository with an enterprise reporting system, and a system that would facilitate the processing of our case loads in a timely, efficient and accurate manner," said Les E. Pearson, systems and programming manager 17th Circuit Court, state of Florida. "We made a wise product choice with the Shadow RTE product from DataDirect, whether in terms of functionality or simplicity of install, the Shadow RTE product has helped us meet our advanced SOA requirements and is a product we can grow with."

Kansas City Life Insurance Company uses the Shadow z/Services(TM) Web services Consumption (WsC) component to support real-time data updates between its mainframe system of record and distributed databases. To improve agent productivity, the insurance carrier created a portal built in the .NET framework that interacts with its CyberLife policy administration package on the mainframe. With the Shadow z/Services component, Kansas City Life Insurance Company was able to encapsulate mainframe logic into reusable, easily deployed services for ease of integration. The Shadow z/Services bi-directional Web services capabilities with SQL server enables the insurance provider to quickly assimilate new agents into the portal community for improved productivity and service levels.

"Service-oriented architectures are providing a way for organizations to more readily integrate their mission-critical mainframe data and applications into new, high-value business applications," said Chris Garner, vice president of research and development for DataDirect Technologies' Shadow products. "The Shadow products have been engineered to seamlessly incorporated Web services and real-time events into a single, integration architecture that allow customers to more rapidly deploy mainframe assets within advanced SOA implementations."

Upcoming Product Demonstrations

Demonstrations of the Shadow RTE product and its capabilities for supporting advanced SOA using real-time mainframe events and Web services will be made at the Gartner Application Development Summit Technology Expo, Phoenix, Arizona, Sept. 25-27, in the Grand Canyon Room 6-12, booth L.

NEON Systems Now DataDirect Technologies

NEON Systems was acquired by Progress Software in January 2006 and is now part of DataDirect Technologies, an operating company of Progress Software Corporation. This acquisition of NEON Systems by DataDirect Technologies will offer customers a single, comprehensive source for data connectivity products and mainframe integration.

About DataDirect Technologies

DataDirect Technologies (www.datadirect.com) is the software industry's only comprehensive provider of software for connecting the world's most critical business applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging standards. Developers worldwide depend on DataDirect(R) products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC(TM) and ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on DataDirect Technologies to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems and to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration. DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS).