IT In-Depth: HIS & HIS - Comparing Cheese with Cheesecake

Battle Royal for 'tn' Gateways

HIS & HIS:

Making Sense of All this Hissing Read Part II

Lets just compare cheese to cheesecake. OK?

by Anura Guruge
editor at large, IT In-Depth

Host Integration Server (HIS) and Host Integration Solution (HIS), one from IBM and the other from Microsoft, are obviously meant to be competitors given the similarity of their names – and one does not have to spell out which product is from whom, given that one these software-only products is positioned as a solution while the other as server. That alone tells you a lot about these two offerings.

Despite the confusion that is caused by this common (and very blasé) acronym [as was the case when IBM HIS was mentioned in the Battle Royal article], these products are to each other as cheese is to cheese-cake – with most likely to agree, in the end, that IBM’s solution is probably the sweeter deal of the two!

MS’s HIS, now as HIS 2004, is trying to make its presence felt after a long, 4 year ‘semi-retirement’ – with HIS 2000 being the last release. HIS 2004’s primary claim to fame is that it now supports Enterprise Extender (EE – aka as HPR-over-IP), a de facto standard [i.e. RFC 2353] instigated by IBM c. 1996. Just to put this EE support into perspective, it is worth noting that the now defunct Novell’s NetWare for SAA 4 (once #1 in the gateway market) and IBM’s Comm. Server had EE support by early 1999. So to be fair to Microsoft, it only took them five years to get around to supporting what they are now pushing as a very strategic IBM sector networking technology.

The SNA Server Legacy

MS HIS (also known as Babylon c. 1998) usurped and subsumed MS SNA Server – Microsoft’s relatively popular LAN-to-SNA gateway. Consequently HIS 2004 can be thought of offering 5 distinct sets of functionality.

1. SNA gateway – which today boils down to a ‘tn’ server

2. SNA transport; i.e. EE

3. Application integration – particularly in terms of host transaction representation in .NET replete
with support for 2-phase commit

4. Data integration; i.e. VSAM and database access

5. Single Sign-On (SSO) enablement

Though its .NET-specific application/data integration capabilities are indubitably powerful (albeit limited to non-screen scraping scenarios), HIS, reflecting its legacy from SNA Server, is still predominantly of interest as an ‘tn’-based SNA Gateway.

The Cheese to Cheesecake Comparison

IBM’s HIS (at v4.1 the last time I looked at it), on the other hand, is more than a gateway and not as concerned about recondite application/data integration features. It also has no truck, whatsoever, with .NET and is totally Java-centric when it comes to host transaction representation in terms of objects.

IBM’s HIS, in marked contrast to HIS 2004, is also not a single product. Instead it is a tantalizing bundle consisting of 6 rather valuable products, at least 4 of them big-ticket items that can arguably contend that they are ‘best-of-breed’. These 6 products that make up IBM’s HIS v4.1 being:

1. HATS v5 for all supported platforms including mainframes, iSeries, Solaris, AIX, z/Linux etc.

2. Host On-Demand [HoD] v8 [which as a Java applet can run on most popular client platforms]

3. Personal Communications (PComm) v5.7 for Windows

4. WebSphere Studio Site Developer v5.1 for Windows NT, 2000 and XP

5. Communications Server v6.1 for Windows 2000/2003 servers and AIX only

6. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) v5 for any platform other than OS/390 and z/OS

Hence why this is can be such a sweet deal, particularly given that IBM, of late, is willing to give away HIS, steeply discounted, from the nominal list of $360/seat (or $450/concurrent session).

Note that HIS includes the highly rated WebSphere Application Server (WAS), the grand-daddy of host access fat clients [i.e. PComm], the feature-rich, Java applet-based HoD ‘thin-client’ and Comm. Server. That, is quite a bundle and you have to tip your hat at IBM for its generosity. In total, when you factor in HATS v5, with its sleek host publishing and host integration capabilities, you have a formidable arsenal of “SNA sector” tools that is hard to march, let alone beat.

Gateway to Gateway

Given the on-going emphasis on gateway [i.e. ‘tn’ server] functionality, the real head-to-head comparison (and competition) here is between HIS 2004 and IBM’s Comm. Server. Comm. Server is genuinely multi-platform and is available on Windows 2000/2003, AIX, Linux for Intel, z/OS and z/Linux. HIS 2004 obviously only runs on Windows. That alone tells you a lot.

Since Comm. Server does run on Windows one can genuinely compare one against the other on Windows 2000 or 2003.

However, from what I have seen, Microsoft, savvy as ever, stays well clear of this Windows-to-Windows comparison. Instead, it promotes HIS 2004 as a cost effective, less complex alternative to Comm. Server z/OS (and z/Linux) and waxes lyrical about how the HIS 2004 eliminates the use of mainframe cycles for ‘tn’ serving.

I have to ardently believe (if not hope) that IT professionals can see the mangled, irrelevant logic here.

If you are concerned about using mainframe cycles for ‘tn’ serving (and I have talked about this at length a long time ago) then you do have the option of using Comm. Server on Windows or Linux/PC.

So that is the first issue that we need to nail.

Don’t get distracted. Don’t get carried away by Microsoft’s line of rhetoric.

So make sure that when evaluating these gateways you always compare cheese to cheesecake and not cheese to chalk as Microsoft would rather have you do.

All the results that we see, from the few public companies operating in this space [e.g. SEAGULL, NetManage, NEON, Jacada], confirm this. Growth is sporadic and at best modest. It is true that one can contend that we never see the real picture since the largest players in this space; i.e. IBM, WRQ, Attachmate, ClientSoft, do not publicize their numbers (which in the case of IBM means is that they do not explicitly spell out their PComm and HIS revenues). But the trends are inescapable.