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 Exclusive Interview with
Charles Jones
Marketing Director,
SofTouch Systems, Inc .
SofTouch Systems' CrossPlex Integration Server [www.softouch.com]
is BEA's solution of choice to
integrate mainframe applications with their award winning BEA
WebLogic Server 8.1 Platform
and BEA
WebLogic Server Workbench. The CrossPlex Mainframe Integration
Server (for IBM z/OS and VSE)
non-invasively transforms
existing mission critical application assets into reusable
components and services without any custom coding. The Web Services
feature of CrossPlex 2.1 exposes mainframe applications as XML Web
Services, using open standards based development tools, and deploys
them maintaining the enterprise-level performance, scalability and
security criteria associated with mission-critical mainframe
applications.
The CrossPlex 2.1 WSDL Generation Wizard will guides developers
step-by-step through the process of extending mainframe applications
to SOA solutions. The application encapsulation services
leverage IBM’s standard adapters and interfaces to programmatically
interact with existing applications and data. The CrossPlex toolset
gives developers the capability to easily map existing business
processes and expose them as Web Services.
Charles Jones, the Marketing
Director of SofTouch since 2004, is here interviewed by
Anura Guruge,
the editor at large for IT In-Depth as to how and why CrossPlex 2.1
differs from other offerings on the market – including IBM’s
CICS Transaction Server
for z/OS V3.1.
Charles Jones
Charles Jones is the Marketing Director for SofTouch Systems. He
has almost 20 years of experience in marketing, sales and software
development. Charles has dealt with all aspects of the SofTouch
mainframe product line since 1985.
Q1:
Charles, with CrossPlex 2.1 you indeed appear to have a very
competent and compelling mainframe-resident host integration
solution, with uncompromised support for XML Web services. Can you
please tell us what you consider to be the true value proposition of
CrossPlex 2.1, especially in terms of your mainframe-based
competition?
A1:
Sure Anu, and thank you for your time today.
CrossPlex fulfills the ‘last mile’ stretch of integration. The last
mile is often the most difficult one, whether it is a marathon, a
home improvement project, or in our case mainframe integration.
CrossPlex complements the existing infrastructure provided by IBM to
non-invasively facilitate the transformation of mainframe
applications and data into modern technologies. Our strengths come
from 25 year's of experience delivering mainframe products to
market with a specific emphasis on CICS, VTAM and 3270 datastreams.
CrossPlex was designed in collaboration with IBM to facilitate the
interaction of WebSphere MQ messages with CICS 3270 based
transactions. At the time there was only one standard
mainframe based API to do this in CICS and that was FEPI.
Today there are several options for programmatically interacting
with 3270’s on the host, but the point I want to make is they all
require coding or application changes as well as savvy technical
skills to implement (the last mile).
 Our
goal from the start was to isolate the application developer from
having to know anything at all about the mainframe. Our
solution delivers everything needed to easily design, develop,
deploy and maintain an encapsulated business process. In terms of
competition on the mainframe, we really only have one competitor
that leverages all of the same set of mainframe API’s that we do (Link3270,
FEPI and OTMA). I think the customer needs to consider a
couple of things from this perspective. Number one would be
performance and scalability. The second thing to consider is which
solution is easiest to use, and that ultimately comes down to the
development workbench provided. The CrossPlex IDE or Workbench
today is Java based and soon to be available as an Eclipse
plugin.
Q2:
Charles, I get a feeling that much of the inherent power of
CrossPlex 2.1 lies in your highly optimized ‘adapter’ technology for
extracting CICS and IMS transactions and data. Is that really the
case and is this a key feature that allows you to be so confident
about enterprise-class performance and scalability?’
A2:
Absolutely! The CrossPlex footprint
resides exclusively on the mainframe. Once again we leverage the
existing infrastructure provided by IBM. Our architecture exploits
all of the inherent capabilities of the mainframe for scalability
and throughput. Let’s take the case of CICS. CrossPlex executes on
behalf of standard CICS transactions and uses the standard CICS
API’s to interact with mainframe applications and data. For either
WebSphere/MQ or HTTP requests the mainframe clustering capabilities
can be exploited such that workloads are distributed evenly
throughout the CICSPlex environment. This is true even if one is
using CrossPlex to reach through CICS to any other mainframe VTAM
based application, like IMS or IDMS.
What that means is that MQ messages or IP requests are routed
proportionally to ‘healthy’ CICS systems for optimal performance.
For scalability as systems begin to meet their maximum threshold or
quality of service, new CICS regions or address spaces can be
activated or instated to handle the additional workload. Keep in
mind that all of this is controlled by the z/OS workload manager
(WLM) infrastructure already in place. What we tell our
customers and prospects in respect to capacity and performance
planning is to simulate a sample workload, estimate the volume of
traffic and use your existing statistics gathering and reporting
mechanisms to determine the impact and measure the throughput.
Q3:
Charles, what about security and what hooks do you provide with
mainframe-based security offerings such as RACF and ACF2
for access control and authentication?
A3:
Since CrossPlex does not require any changes to existing
applications, the current security infrastructure remains intact.
For instance, when accessing a 3270 application, the standard sign
on processes may be invoked. Userid and sign on information are
propagated at runtime from the client as needed for each of the
respective API’s being used. There are no hooks. CrossPlex
conforms to all standard IBM API techniques. The mainframe SSL
capabilities are exploited as well for encryption.
Q4:
Charles,
if we are talking just about CICS, and a customer wants to expose
some CICS functionality as XML Web services why should they opt for
CrossPlex rather than just using IBM’s new Web services capability
with the z/OS CICS
Transaction Server V3.1?
A4:
Good question Anu and this is probably the most popular question
lately with the recent release of CTS 3.1. Here is why you should
still consider CrossPlex. First of all, the functionality for XML
Web services requires WSED (WebSphere Enterprise Developer).
Secondly it still doesn’t address the proverbial ‘last mile stretch’
as I talked about earlier. What should someone consider here?
Well, with CTS 3.1 the customer gets one free license of WSED. For
additional copies there will be per seat charges incurred. If your
strategy is WebSphere it may make sense depending on your
integration needs. If your strategy is WebSphere or not CrossPlex
does what CTS 3.1 does with less deployment costs and complements
the new offering quite well (the last mile).
Q5:
Charles, please tell us how BizTalk Server 2004 and HIS
2004 complement each other and how do you see these two products
playing out, vis-à-vis each other, down the road … in say two years
time?
A5:
Ok, let me
reboot here. Here’s my take on things. BizTalk being Microsoft’s
equivalent to WSBI (WebSphere Business Integration Server) as an
orchestration engine for manipulating business objects via BPEL and
HIS 2004’s ability to expose mainframe applications ‘business logic’
as XML based services seems to be a viable SOA solution all in all.
I think you’ll still have the scalability issues of what we call
‘off host’ encapsulation solutions but this will be appealing
certainly to big Microsoft shops as well as cases in which customers
do not own the application or do not or cannot incur additional mips
on the mainframe. For shops that are migrating off of the mainframe
to Microsoft this will most likely be a good transition solution.
Those in the middle may use it to tie legacy with distributed,
however those anchored to the big iron will benefit most from an
architected solution such as CrossPlex, generating or providing
services directly from the mainframe.
Then
again mainframe shops will still need a solution like CrossPlex if
they want to integrate 3270 based applications since HIS 2004
doesn’t address this type of integration need. In two years, it all
depends on how well it’s received. Another consideration that may
impact HIS 2004 adoption down the road is the evolution of mainframe
software platforms such as CICS. As we just discussed, CTS 3.1 has
the capability of exposing mainframe applications as XML based
services. If the HIS equivalent functionality evolves into the base
mainframe software there will be less of a need for HIS to interact
with BizTalk. As we discussed, it may be a viable option for some
of the low to mid range mainframe shops today but less so on down
the road as the mainframe core systems evolve.
Q6:
Charles, as my last question, given that you folks now have had a
fair amount of exposure to Web services, what are the factors or
issues that mainframe customers are going to be most concerned about
when exploring SOA solutions?
A6: Another
good question Anu. I’ll give you my opinion based on what I know of
exposing mainframe applications as services. There are many facets
of SOA from infrastructure management solutions, ESB’s, integration
tools, to SOAP/WSDL generation testing tools and BPEL orchestration
engines. That doesn’t even cover policy and procedure and best
practices guidelines. However, what we are seeing is that it boils
down to the same things that we have dealt with from the beginning
when we entered the integration server market in 1996, and that is
ease of use, scalability, reliability and performance. Right now we
are working with a customer of ours that is one of the largest
financial institutions in the world. Their primary concern was
performance, scalability and reliability. Everything we touched on
earlier all still applies. Vendor volatility is a primary concern.
Be sure and select a vendor that has a proven track record on the
mainframe that you know will be there tomorrow and truly has a
verified solution that stacks up and delivers on the marketing hype.
On a totally different spectrum of things I recently chatted with
the head of CICS for one of the largest banks in America. He has
about 50 CICS system programmers working for him. What are his
challenges? Continuing to make CICS a valid platform to deploy
mission critical applications supporting the latest technologies.
They recently deployed an application using the CICS
SOAP support pack. It’s critical for him to convey the message that the
mainframe is a valid SOA platform and it has evolved to support the
latest of technologies and architectures. So here’s a situation
where the mainframe IT division needs to convince the powers that be
that yes, the mainframe is still alive and well and open for
business as it always has been well before Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs
even got their first driver’s license. I think those are some of
the issues most unique to the mainframe world.
Failover Recovery in CICS Sysplex
Configuration
Thank you very much Charles.
This will definitely help folks
appreciate what CrossPlex 2.1 can do for them. I hope you get
a lot of calls from our readers. |
