Mass media for some time has been bringing us the story of the IT shortage that looms before us. The headlines all seem to be the same—for good reason. We’re told the problem spans industry and education. From healthcare to manufacturing, IT demands aren’t being met. High schools are pumping out fewer students who want to major in, or are even capable of studying, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects.

The big picture here is that companies ultimately will lose out on profitability and productivity, affecting the entire economy.

Despite the urgency of this problem, it didn’t appear overnight. It’s been coming slowly down the pipeline for decades, and most of us would be forgiven for not exactly predicting this predicament we’re in. Offshoring, for example, which had long been touted as a golden ticket to meeting IT demands, is now in decline, largely due to the decrease in quality that many companies had experienced from relying so heavily on the practice. In the meantime, IT job growth from 2000 to 2010 grew by 86 percent, while IT graduations in the last several years has dropped by 35 percent.

Add to this the evolving IT job description—which often demands workers who are proficient not just in technical skills, but also strong leadership and core industry business knowledge—and it’s easy to see how this IT labor shortage has gradually evolved as well.

But here it is, and it’s a problem we must deal with now. With the global workforce supply expected to be greatly eclipsed by demand in the years to come, all companies will need a workforce strategy that’s multifaceted to meet the challenge.

For many organizations, this will mean they must first understand just how different the workforce looks today. That’s easier said than done. Old ideas and traditions tend to stick when it comes to our employees. After all, for the last several decades, we’ve all been coming to work, sitting at our desks and working the traditional 40-hour week, more or less.

But on a practical level, this big picture isn’t really true anymore, especially for those working in IT. Generational gaps are driving a distinctly different workplace culture. Seventy percent of IT workers prefer to work remotely; that’s more than any other profession. Fifty-five percent are planning to change employers to foster their career growth. IT professionals don’t just want to perform tasks, they want to derive meaning and opportunities from the work they do. And they’re heavily using their social media networks to make career decisions.

On a more strategic level, companies will likely get to the point when they realize they can’t deal with such changing workforce models on their own. How will organizations, for example, still find the best skillsets with such a labor shortage? How will they have the ability to engage free agent talent (contingent labor, consultants, independent contractors, crowd sourcing models) if they’ve never really done so before?

Workforce partners that work with companies to meet these challenges fortunately aren’t in the business of just filling jobs with warm bodies anymore. The best workforce partners are those that have vast pools of global talent within their reach—and know how to strategically engage the talent supply chain when the time is right. They know how to network and integrate free agent talent. And they have connections with several IT providers and secondary IT suppliers that can add to a company’s overall workforce strategy.

With a profoundly different workforce culture that’s driving non-traditional work engagements—and with talent such a scarcity in today’s IT world—companies need to prepare so they don’t get left behind when it comes to acquiring the best IT talent. Failing to do so could severely hamper the execution of IT strategies.

We’re all capable of fixing this problem, but we must act now.

CA Technologies has announced that Integra (F/K/A Integra Telecom), a provider of fiber-based, enterprise-grade networking, communications and technology solutions, has deployed CA Performance Management (CA PM), the core network and systems monitoring product in the company’s converged infrastructure management solution.

Integra uses CA PM to monitor, analyze and report the real-time status and trends of its enterprise-class network consisting of a 5,000-mile long-haul fiber-optic network, a nationwide IP/MPLS network and 3,000 miles of metropolitan fiber. This helps Integra to assure the performance, availability and quality of the many services it provides to businesses in 35 metropolitan markets.

“Integra is committed to providing business customers with scalable and reliable communications solutions that grow with their needs. Through strategic relationships with world-class technology partners such as CA Technologies, Integra aligns its business strategy with customer demand,” said Jason Koenders, senior vice president, engineering and network planning at Integra. “CA Performance Management offers easy-to-use management and customizable reporting tools, which support Integra’s goal of providing best-in-class services and an exceptional customer experience.”

Integra integrated CA PM with other management technologies previously deployed in its environment, including CA Spectrum® and CA Network Flow Analysis. The integration of these elements of CA Technologies converged infrastructure management solution enhances CA PM’s ability to translate volumes of disparate performance data into actionable insight. CA PM then delivers this data in converged, role-based dashboards that help Integra to cost effectively improve IT efficiency, and enhance the quality of their internal and customer-facing services.

“More than ever, service providers must understand the complex relationships and interdependencies between physical, virtual and cloud environments, wired and wireless networks, applications and their combined impact on customer experience,” said Mike Sargent, general manager, Service Assurance, CA Technologies. “The ability of our converged infrastructure management solution to manage all aspects of infrastructure performance, availability, capacity, flow and application response in a single, productivity-enhancing user interface, will enable Integra to quickly and proactively triage and remediate service-threatening infrastructure issues. As a result, Integra will be able to deliver a superior and differentiated customer experience with less effort and lower cost.”

About CA Technologies

CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) provides IT management solutions that help customers manage and secure complex IT environments to support agile business services. Organizations leverage CA Technologies software and SaaS solutions to accelerate innovation, transform infrastructure and secure data and identities, from the data center to the cloud. Learn more about CA Technologies at www.ca.com.

"Vendor revenue in the 2012 ITOM software market demonstrated moderate single-digit growth, after two consecutive years of nearly double-digit growth, due in part to slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition (M&A) activity," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. "Nevertheless, the ITOM market did manage to grow slightly above the average growth rate of the infrastructure software market, and by doing so it gained share of IT budgets."

Pushing the growth of the ITOM market, although at a less-frantic pace, were continued investments in virtualisation management tools and promising cloud computing technologies, which are the key drivers behind the growth in the configuration management and availability and performance segments, and also in the other ITOM category, in which Cloud Management Platform (CMP) pure-play vendors are represented.

Continued strong growth in workload automation and IT process automation demonstrates that IT organisations are still investing heavily in more traditional technology and process improvement initiatives; there is also an increased effort to automate private cloud services. The evolution of IT service desk tools into IT service support management tools contributed to growth in the market as vendors are supplementing foundational technologies with the addition of features such as mobility, collaboration, IT service visualisation, and more advanced analytics and reporting.

The top five ITOM vendors, ranked by revenue, grew 0.6 per cent in 2012, compared with 7 per cent growth in 2011, and accounted for 55 per cent share, or $9.9 billion, of the overall ITOM software market in terms of revenue. The ranking of the top five vendors did not change from 2010 through 2012 (see Table 1). Among the top five vendors, Microsoft led the group in year-on-year growth at 16 per cent, while the rest of the top five remained flat or saw declining growth.

CA Technologies and BMC Software are tracking neck and neck, with less than $200 million between them. After displacing HP from the No. 4 position in 2010, Microsoft continues to rapidly gain on BMC and CA Technologies, with Microsoft just less than $650 million behind CA Technologies.

"The most interesting vendors to watch in terms of dynamics will be those with revenue ranging from $100 million to $500 million," said Ms Wurster. "Strategies on business models (software as a service [SaaS], subscription and cloud-based), as well as partnering programmes to obtain reach into regions outside North America, Western Europe and mature Asia/Pacific, will be key to growth."

At the regional level, North America, Western Europe and mature Asia/Pacific were the prime consumers of ITOM software in 2012. Nearly 90 per cent of this market is concentrated in these developed markets, suggesting that the older and more complex the infrastructure is, the more organisations need tools to manage it. Although emerging Asia/Pacific and Latin America remained growth leaders in 2012, neither was able to sustain the strong growth they experienced in 2011. The biggest laggards were Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with decreases of more than 1.5 per cent each. All other areas saw low- to mid-single-digit growth.

Across the ITOM segments, workload automation and IT process automation (distributed) was the only product segment able to maintain the strong double-digit growth experienced in 2011. Most other segments experienced a 2 per cent to 3 per cent year-on-year decline in growth rates compared with 2011. Many ITOM subcategories are commoditising, as end users replace high-cost tools from the Big Four vendors with lower-cost tools at a 10th of the cost overall, thereby contracting the market and providing high growth for many low-cost providers.

Syncsort, a global leader in Big Data integration solutions, today announced the availability of its Spring '13 release, including two brand new Hadoop products and breakthrough enhancements to DMX that turn Hadoop into a more robust, feature rich and easy-to-use ETL solution.

Big Data is prompting organizations to look at Hadoop to process more data in less time and for less money, but Hadoop is not yet a complete ETL solution. Syncsort's two new offerings for Hadoop – DMX-h ETL Edition  and DMX-h Sort Edition are designed to strengthen Hadoop by providing the full functionality required to deliver enterprise ETL capabilities. They provide greater ease-of-use and maximize node performance compared to non-native, code-generating ETL tools. In addition, performance and connectivity enhancements to DMX expand usage by end-users and partners.  

"Analyzing Big Data is critical to our customers' ability to sustain competitiveness, but the avalanche of information is breaking traditional data integration architectures ─ many of the tools are too code and resource intensive and ultimately drive costs too high," said Josh Rogers, senior vice president, data integration business, Syncsort. "With our new DMX editions, we are strengthening Hadoop by providing seamless and powerful ETL and sort capabilities and at the same time, reinvigorating the value proposition of ETL by leveraging the power of Hadoop to scale core processing of Big Data."

The new DMX-h solutions take advantage of Syncsort's recent contribution to Apache Hadoop, which provides a unique level of native integration to deliver best in class data integration capabilities and Sort acceleration for Apache Hadoop distributions.

Highlights of the DMX-h ETL include:

• Smarter Architecture. DMX-h has the only ETL engine that runs natively within MapReduce, maximizing node performance.
• Smarter Development. Hadoop ETL without coding. Developers can leverage an easy-to-use Windows GUI and deploy seamlessly into Hadoop.
• Smarter Productivity. "Use case accelerators" – a library of pre-built templates help developers fast-track Hadoop ETL implementations.
• Smarter Connectivity. Extends access to and delivery of all data, including from the mainframe.
• Smarter Economics. Smarter architecture, development, connectivity and productivity combine to help drive results in less time and at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

Benchmark Results

Recent Syncsort benchmarks show significant Hadoop performance and resource efficiency improvements when using DMX-h. More importantly, the results show very predictable and sustainable throughput even as data volumes grow. Using the TeraSort benchmark, DMX-h Sort Edition achieved a sustainable throughput of over 100 megabytes per second per node (MB/S/N) delivering upwards of 2x higher throughput per node­ than Hadoop's native sort at 45 MB/S/N. Similarly, DMX-h ETL Edition achieved sustainable throughput in excess of 255 MB/S/N for up to 2.5x faster performance than Pig when aggregating 2TB of Web log data. In both cases, tests were run for data volumes ranging from 500GB to 2TB of data. While alternatives such as Hadoop's native sort and Pig reach a saturation point - where throughput starts to decline - at around 500GB of data, DMX-h delivered sustainable and predictable performance from 500GB to 2TB. The implications are huge for organizations, as they can more efficiently size their Hadoop infrastructure, minimize uncertainty and achieve a more predictable cost–structure as Big Data becomes even bigger.

Supporting Quotes

"Hadoop is lowering the cost structure of processing data at scale, but deploying Hadoop at the enterprise level is not free, and significant hardware and IT productivity costs can damage ROI," said Evan Quinn, Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Syncsort's Spring '13 release provides unique capabilities in Hadoop to help maximize savings, delivering best-in-class ETL technology at a price point that is highly disruptive for the data integration market, and more consistent with the cost structure of open source solutions."

"In tag management, we facilitate a huge number of interactions between marketers and their vendors, and as a result, we are able to see the complex journey a consumer takes prior to making a purchase. This involves a huge amount of data processing.  To be competitive, we must convert the high volume of 'path-to-purchase' data captured by our platform into actionable intelligence that drives decisions by both marketers and their vendors," said Ave Wrigely, CTO of TagMan.  "What's compelling about Syncsort's latest DMX product deliveries is the unique approach to replacing older code-driven approaches with a streamlined, GUI-driven way to collect, cleanse and distribute information inside and outside of Hadoop, saving time and resources and giving us maximum flexibility in preparing Big Data for business analytics and data visualization."

"Cloudera sees ETL as one of the top use cases for Hadoop ─ it is essential to our mission of maximizing the value of big data," said Amr Awadallah, Chief Technology Officer, Cloudera. "We see Syncsort's new DMX-h offerings enabling our mutual customers with critical data integration and ETL capabilities which simplify ETL deployments while efficiently processing data natively on Hadoop.  The CDH 4.2 release includes Syncsort's contribution to Apache Hadoop making the sort phase pluggable, enabling DMX-h, and broadening use cases on Hadoop."

Fast Start DMX-h ETL Test Drive

Anyone looking to leverage DMX-h ETL can now download a free test drive that contains everything they require without the need to set up their own Hadoop cluster. It includes a Linux Virtual Machine with Cloudera CDH 4.2 and DMX-h ETL Edition pre-installed, along with use case accelerators and sample data.

Enterprise Executive recently caught up with Brocade Communications (Brocade) CEO Lloyd Carney to discuss the company’s long history of providing networking technologies supporting both ESCON and FICON, its relationship with IBM and growth opportunities in the mainframe market.

Enterprise Executive: Lloyd, please tell us a little about Brocade.

Lloyd Carney: Brocade is a company forged out of the data center that has delivered networking technologies in the most mission-critical IT environments throughout our 17-year history. We’re a pure-play networking company with a complete portfolio for enterprise and service provider customer segments as well as a broad number of vertical industries. Brocade is also a pioneer and the undisputed leader in the Fibre Channel storage area networking market, which has given us opportunities to form strategic partnerships with companies such as IBM.

EE: What is Brocade’s history with mainframe technology?

Carney: Brocade has a long, unique history with mainframe technology going back more than 25 years to 1987 and bus and tag channel extension. Our corporate “family tree” includes companies such as Data Switch, Computerm, Inrange, CNT, McDATA and Foundry Networks. We developed and manufactured many generations of products supporting both ESCON and FICON technologies, including the DCX 8510, which is our ninth-generation FICON director.

We also have a rich history and a complete portfolio for mainframe/data center extension through technologies such as Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), which is now in its seventh generation of release. That vast experience is now leading us to become the trusted IP networking provider for utility computing, grid computing and real-time software replication. Of course, behind all that is a great team of people. We have the best, brightest, most skilled and innovative team of mainframe experts in the industry who have been part of that Brocade family tree for many years.

EE: What is Brocade’s history with IBM?

Carney: It parallels the history with mainframe technology I just mentioned. We have a close working partnership with IBM System z in Poughkeepsie and IBM’s storage team in Tucson. We hold multiple technical-interlock meetings with IBM each year. During these interlocks, we exchange product roadmaps and development ideas. We have a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) with IBM that has led to some innovative technologies for our mutual customers, including several co-patents with IBM on ESCON and FICON-related technologies.

EE: Why is the mainframe still a relevant technology today?

Carney: The IBM mainframe is the Mark Twain of IT; reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, mainframes are alive and well, and are continuing to deliver business value to the companies that depend on them. The IBM mainframe is still extremely relevant technology in 2013. All 50 of the world’s top global banks depend on the IBM System z to run the most sophisticated, I/O-intensive transactions on the planet. More than 20 of the 25 largest U.S. retailers continue to run their businesses on IBM mainframes. Brocade is proud that our FICON directors account for more than 80 percent of the installed storage area networking infrastructure in these global enterprises. They’re our most important and valued customers, and it’s an honor that we’re trusted for their mission-critical infrastructure.

EE: Beyond the well-established markets, are there growth opportunities left for mainframes?

Carney: Certainly, there are still many growth opportunities for mainframe and FICON markets in the emerging countries and regions such as the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. More than 180 new companies have joined the System z community since 2010, one-third of those are from fast-growing countries such as Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Russia, China and India. We see the trend reflected in the growth of our mainframe-related product business as well as our storage networking solutions in those same countries. The one advantage customers in these regions have is their ability to deploy the latest-generation technologies, including the Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel/FICON solutions, that will provide them the most state-of-the-art capabilities and features.

EE: What is the mainframe’s role in the evolution of key IT trends such as cloud, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and virtualization?

Carney: The IBM mainframe has always been at the forefront in the evolution of IT trends. Let’s look at virtualization for a moment. IBM pioneered the concept of virtual storage on S/370 in the early ’70s. The famous August 1972 IBM System/370 Advanced Function announcement introduced four new IBM mainframe operating systems: DOS/VS (DOS with virtual storage), OS/VS1 (OS/MFT with virtual storage), OS/VS2 (OS/MVT with virtual storage, which would grow into SVS and MVS) and VM/370. Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) is still with us in the form of z/OS. The concept of virtual machines has been around for more than 40 years now, thanks to the IBM mainframe. As far as cloud computing goes, thanks to that pioneering work in virtualization, the IBM mainframe and today’s System z were clouds before cloud was a word. Few people realize that the first Storage Area Network (SAN) was ESCON. And as far as SDN goes, I think the modern System z led the way with the z/OS Communications Server.

EE: What is Brocade’s current R&D strategy for the mainframe market?

Carney: Brocade is a customer-centric company. We take very seriously our customers’ input and suggestions for feature enhancements and new capabilities. Many of these recommendations still come from our mainframe/FICON customers. We then focus a good part of our R&D efforts on developing these requested enhancements.

We’re also an active participant with leadership roles in the various standards bodies, as well as mainframe-centric users groups such as SHARE, CMG and Guide-SHARE Europe. Finally, those technical interlock meetings with IBM I mentioned earlier lead to co-development efforts with IBM for the System z and with other companies with their respective solutions.

One area that’s very exciting in this arena is what IBM is doing with long-distance replication for mainframe customers. Specifically, GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex) Active-Active continuous availability (GDPS/A-A) is a fundamental paradigm shift for near-continuous availability solutions. It allows our mutual customers to reach unlimited distances between their data center sites and achieve the recovery time objectives of one minute or less, previously only available in a metro area solution. GDPS/A-A is two or more sites, separated by unlimited distances and having the same data, with cross-site workload monitoring and balancing. GDPS/A-A is planned to be delivered over time, and we’re examining and working on development efforts with IBM.

EE: What key technological advancements has Brocade introduced recently for the mainframe market?

Carney: We’ve introduced several enhancements in our Fibre Channel operating system known as FOS, or Fabric OS. There are several more currently undergoing qualification at IBM Poughkeepsie with our latest operating system release (FOS 7.1). For example, we’ve added some enhanced diagnostics features to FICON CUP that will allow for integration of our FICON directors with the IBM z/OS Health Check functionality. We made some significant enhancements to our FOS Extended Fabrics feature that will simplify buffer credit management for applications such as multisite Disaster Recovery (DR). We’ve also recently introduced some exciting, new technologies that will enable customers to more efficiently utilize their cross-site bandwidth, as bandwidth between sites is the most expensive cost in any DR architecture. Anything Brocade can do to allow our customers to improve performance and reduce costs over those DR networks is a win-win for the customer and for Brocade.

EE: How much longer will Brocade continue to invest in the mainframe market?

Carney: Brocade will continue to invest in the mainframe market for as long as there are mainframes, which likely means for a long time to come.

IDAA or zIIP?

IDAA, which runs on the IBM zEnterprise 196 or 114 with IBM Netezza 1000-3 hardware, provides benefits similar to zIIP engines. IDAA allows you to offload large, expensive, heavy-hitter queries to a separate machine, thereby decreasing consumption on the mainframe. The result is lower operating costs, improved performance and better control.

How do you know if you should move a workload to IDAA? With zIIP engines, users are dependent on the executing software to determine if processing can run on the zIIP. In addition, the zIIP might be busy, so work must remain on the expensive CPU, and the full potential of savings aren’t realized. However, at the end of the day, mainframe customers with zIIP engines can save MIPS, and that helps reduce costs.

People want choices in how to reduce mainframe costs, so think of IDAA as another option that can achieve the same benefits as zIIP engines—reducing CPU by moving workloads off the mainframe. Before you purchase IDAA, however, make sure your workloads can actually be moved to the IDAA system. That decision depends on your processing for large data warehouse applications.

IDAA can provide substantial savings because it reduces the mainframe MIPS by redirecting DB2 queries that run on the mainframe to the new IDAA machine. These queries save mainframe CPU, and application queries will run faster. This enables business decisions to be made and acted upon in a fraction of the traditional time required on the mainframe. It’s up to the DB2 Optimizer to determine if a query benefits from running off-platform with IDAA or whether it’s better to run within the DB2 system on the mainframe. Looking at the Optimizer data can tell you whether your five-page, one-hour elapsed, 20-minute CPU time query would run on IDAA. You can also see if all your queries are IDAA-worthy because the DB2 explain function contains information about accelerator usage or lack of usage. It identifies whether the query qualifies for acceleration. If not, it will give a reason code.

Monitoring IDAA

If you’re adopting IDAA, it’s important to ensure you have the right products to manage it. Look for a monitoring solution that will either help you move to the IDAA or will enable you to manage and validate that you’re getting the most benefit from the IDAA.

The solution should be able to support the IDAA through collecting statistics on systems and reporting how much savings you’re achieving versus running the jobs on the mainframe itself. The reports should include a historical view of just how well the IDAA is working for you. This is particularly important, as your organization might run millions of queries against the IDAA.

You may need to run reports nightly that summarize this data and identify just how much you're using the IDAA. By processing the system records efficiently, you can get the answers quickly. For example, a telecommunications company used mainframe monitoring technology to collect valuable performance data and mined the information to show savings of zIIPs as well as IDAA queries. So, by using the technology and understanding how processing was trending, this company was able to save millions of dollars a day.

The total cost of ownership of a mainframe is considerable. IDAA is one innovation that can help you improve mainframe performance while lowering costs. Mainframe monitoring technology for IDAA can help you achieve these objectives.
 

The heart of the UF Mobile Web is the Integrated Student Information System, which keeps students on track with class schedules, required textbooks, academic dates and information, grades and important announcements. In addition, a live interactive map of the campus shows where buildings are located and where a bus is on its route, while an emergency feature allows users to contact the UF Police or the operator in two clicks.

The UF Mobile Web was developed using the Mobile Web Open Source Project, but users are actually accessing data via the university’s IBM CICS Transaction Server, which runs on IBM System z.

UF realized that by taking advantage of its IBM System z environment, it could mitigate risks such as poor application quality, inconsistent connectivity across devices and lack of security. With System z, the application performs to the highest standards, while maintaining the integrity of personal and confidential data.

With its ability to scale, deliver high levels of availability and offer the highest levels of security available on a commercial platform, System z can meet the demands for data integrity when communicating with mobile applications. And with the widespread growth of Linux to power these applications, it’s the logical place to start.

For companies interested in mobile apps, there are three common goals identified, which also offer the most opportunity for System z:

Build and connect. Connecting to and running back-end systems in support of mobile. Businesses are struggling to bridge the gap between mobile devices and enterprise data and services by using services that extend network applications and capabilities to the increasing diversity of mobile devices. This can allow them to maximize worker productivity and deliver more satisfying customer engagement. Key capabilities include building Web applications that can be connected to System z. 

IBM solutions: IBM Worklight Studio with Rational Developer on System z gives customers a common set of tools for end-to-end mobile development for System z. Companies get the advantages of native app development, and then use WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Message Broker to connect back-end applications with mobile devices.

Manage and secure. Managing mobile devices and applications and securing mobile business. With millions of employees expected to join those already following a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy at work, this is an especially critical challenge. Enterprises are looking for ways to enable secure transactions from virtually any device and any location, while keeping the network protected and running efficiently.

IBM solutions: IBM Endpoint Manager enables businesses to adopt BYOD strategies and supports security of mobile devices. It provides a single view for visibility, management and automation to simplify administration and reduce total cost of ownership as employees connect back to data on System z.

Extend and transform. Extending existing business capabilities to mobile devices and transforming business by creating new opportunities. There’s more to the mobile app than building, managing and securing it—and it offers more potential than simply looking up information. Companies want to redefine the customer experience at every touchpoint, including the moment of decision.

IBM offers solutions, such as Cognos, that link mobile with analytics and social business. It will help clients reinvent the customer experience, extend customer marketing to mobile devices, and empower employees and Business Partners with anywhere-anytime information and collaboration.

IBM solutions: IBM Rational Tools allow IT to integrate requirements, planning and quality management into the mobile app development lifecycle.

Mobile is a transformational business model that’s changing the way we work. IBM’s goal is to be the number one provider for enterprise mobile solutions, and clearly, System z will play a strong role in this success.

Top 3 Mobile Concerns

According to a 2011 “IBM Tech Trends Report,” these are the top concerns:

1. Security/Privacy (53 percent)
2. Cost of developing for multiplatform (52 percent) 
3. Integrating cloud service with mobile (51 percent).

The IT industry is undergoing a mobile transformation as the explosion of mobile devices in the marketplace has driven service providers, such as banks and utility companies, to offer mobile applications. The proliferation of mobile devices brings a new raft of challenges to application developers as they do battle with competing platforms, frameworks and technologies—and this is just on the mobile device. This doesn’t even begin to address the additional complexity of connecting to existing enterprise services, many built long before mobile devices appeared on the scene.

Thankfully, a revolution of this sort isn’t uncommon in IT. Think back 10 years before the mainstream uptake of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which led to the service-enablement of many existing back-end applications, extending their reach and transforming business flexibility in the process. Mobile is similar in this respect, offering business another transformational step, broadening the reach, flexibility and immediacy of the services they offer.

The challenge facing mobile developers today is to create a compelling mobile solution without having to re-architect the enterprise to achieve it. Businesses worldwide already have a huge investment in IT solutions, and when we look at the world of the mainframe, the applications and data they host are typically there to support core business. As businesses try to differentiate themselves from their competition, they often turn to IT solutions to find an advantage. It’s no surprise that businesses are seeking technology solutions to unlock the value of their mainframe assets and extend their reach onto the mobile platform.

Mobiles and Mainframes

What do we really mean by mobile? For most people, the term mobile is synonymous with a mobile phone. However, we shouldn’t limit our thinking; today, the term covers a broad range of form factors—from the smartphone to the tablet—and we’re even starting to see the convergence of the mobile platform with laptops. As we noted before, this represents a huge challenge to the mobile developer in determining which platform(s) they should support. Of course, the mobile transformation isn’t without its supporting frameworks; jQuery, Dojo and Sencha offer developers a simplified approach to building a common look and feel for their apps. However, these frameworks certainly aren’t the complete integration solution a developer needs to connect to their enterprise applications and resources residing on the mainframe.

So, we’ve looked at what mobile means, but what about the mainframe? What are we referring to when we use that term? The mainframe is home to critical enterprise applications and data. It’s common for mainframe applications to be hosted inside CICS Transaction Server (TS), with their accompanying data stored in DB2 or perhaps on VSAM files. In a modern enterprise, you might also expect the applications to be based on an SOA model, where subcomponents have been enabled as Web services. CICS TS provides a robust, scalable, secure transaction processing environment capable of handling millions of transactions per day. CICS TS also ensures updates to multiple data sources remain consistent, even when failures, such as crediting and debiting bank accounts, occur.

Bridging the Gap

Building a mobile offering around existing mainframe resources might sound like an unusual match, but we’ve already recognized that the mainframe represents the core business and IT investment, and the growth of the mobile application market can’t be ignored. Business requires a solution that can bridge the gap between the mobile and the mainframe in a way that makes it easy to support multiple mobile platforms.

The IBM Mobile Foundation provides the solution in the form of IBM Worklight. IBM Worklight provides a platform for developing and managing applications for mobile devices. It enables you to create rich mobile applications without relying on unpopular scripting languages and it supports all popular mobile platforms. More important, from the mainframe perspective, it also offers a middle-tier component, the Worklight Server. 

A common concern among data center managers and architects is mainframe security. Given the critical nature of the applications and data residing on the mainframe, being able to isolate it from the outside world is imperative. The Worklight Server acts as a gateway between the mobile and mainframe worlds, providing secure connections to the mainframe through its adapter-based architecture.

CICS Support for JSON Data

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is becoming the industry’s favored solution for mobile data exchange, thanks to its lightweight formatting rules that don’t require costly processing. The IBM CICS Transaction Server Feature Pack for Mobile Extensions V1.0 introduces native support for JSON data in CICS and is available at no additional cost. This immediately removes a significant barrier between the mobile device and the mainframe application, allowing them to communicate in a common language. The final piece of the puzzle is the Worklight Server, which provides an HTTP adapter that can be used to connect to CICS to send and receive JSON data, finally linking the mobile to the mainframe.

A Mobile-to-Mainframe Example

Let’s consider an insurance company that wants to offer its customers a mobile insurance solution. The company might have gone through an SOA transformation in the past, so it already has a componentized architecture for its core business services. It wants to bring these services to its customers without having to introduce new application components to do so.

Figure 1 illustrates the three core components we discussed earlier in a typical configuration pattern. The application running on the mobile device connects to the Worklight Server, passing a request in JSON format. The Worklight Server’s adapter validates the request before passing it on to CICS, again in JSON format or as a SOAP request. CICS receives the request and invokes the target service, converting the JSON data into the format expected by the target service. When the service responds, CICS packages the response in JSON format and returns it to the Worklight Server, which in turn passes it back to the mobile device. The beauty of this solution is twofold: The mobile application developer doesn’t need to worry about the native data format of the mainframe application, thanks to the JSON support, and the mainframe application developers don’t need to modify any application code to support the mobile offering.

JSON: Not Just for Mobile

JSON format isn’t restricted to use with just mobile devices. Its lightweight representation and ease of processing mean it has been widely adopted and supported. JSON extensions exist for a wide range of languages, and native support is now available in Web browsers. Many IBM products also have support for JSON, among them is WebSphere Message Broker. The CICS Feature Pack for Mobile Extensions opens up opportunities for connecting CICS to a vast spectrum of devices and technologies extending far beyond mobile.

Summary

The proliferation of mobile devices is a global phenomenon, and it’s having a profound effect on the way we go about our daily lives. Everything from reading the news, to checking stock markets, to transferring money between accounts can now be done on the move from a mobile device. As business starts to exploit new mobile service offerings, connecting to existing enterprise systems becomes increasingly important—especially doing so without excessive cost, disruption or a need to re-architect existing applications.

CICS TS is host to many core business applications; the challenge is finding a suitable solution to exploit these applications on mobile devices. In conjunction with Worklight Server, CICS TS provides a robust, scalable hosting environment capable of handling the most demanding mobile-driven workloads. The IBM CICS Transaction Server Feature Pack for Mobile Extensions V1.0, available at http://ibm.com/cics/mobile, provides improved integration with mobile devices, thanks to the JSON support it offers. If you want to deliver compelling mobile solutions that support all the major mobile platforms, integrated with your existing mainframe applications, then CICS TS combined with the new mobile feature pack and Worklight Server provide the robust platform you need.

For further information on CICS and mobile, watch the CICS goes Mobile Webcast, available at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/cicsdev/entry/cics_goes_mobile_
webcast_replay1?lang=en.

Bring the mainframe to your mobile by unleashing the value of your enterprise.

You may have in-house, non-cloud solutions that provide five 9s uptime and adhere to the strictest levels of security, but when moved to the cloud, public or private, you may be concerned that you won’t be able to get those same levels of service. This is especially true with the public cloud; for this reason, many companies are turning to internally hosted cloud solutions. The natural inclination is to push these solutions onto a sprawl of distributed servers, but in many cases, this isn’t the optimal place to host them. In fact, System z could easily be the most optimal platform for your deployments. Consider these five key reasons why:

1. Even cloud solutions need robust platforms. If you’re convinced that moving to the cloud is a good idea, and you’re hosting your solutions in a private cloud, then you need to determine which platform provides the optimum environment for your various applications and evaluate business requirements related to reliability, cost, security and performance.

For more and more organizations, these cloud service requirements are leading straight to the mainframe. No system is more robust than the System z, and compliance teams will agree the mainframe offers unmatched security. When it comes to performance and scalability, System z outperforms everything else in the data center. Sometimes the mainframe isn’t viewed as being the most cost-effective platform, but for Linux it absolutely can be.

2. It runs the same Linux you run on other platforms. There are many misconceptions about running Linux on the mainframe, the primary one being there’s something special about that version of Linux. Organizations tend to think of the mainframe as a place to run only z/OS-based systems, but by leveraging Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processors, you can run the exact same Linux systems you run in your distributed environment. Both SUSE and RedHat have equivalent System z Linux distributions.

3. It can be an extremely cost-effective platform. Another misconception when looking at Linux is that the mainframe is expensive. This is based on the thought that adding work to the mainframe will increase those MIPS-related costs; however, you can use IFLs, which cost a fraction of a System z general purpose processor. In fact, the mainframe can often be more cost-effective than the same distributed environment—especially if you have high uptime requirements.

If you already own a mainframe, then there’s a 60 percent chance it already has one or more IFLs installed, regardless of whether or not you’re using them. IFLs sit in the existing mainframe chassis, so even if you must purchase an IFL, you won’t be adding to your data center floor space, power consumption or cooling costs. Plus, you’re already managing the hardware, security, networking, etc.

On top of the infrastructure savings, the savings in license costs can be even more significant. One such example is an insurance company that has indicated their total costs for hardware, software and support were up to 80 percent less than in a distributed environment. This is especially true for software that’s licensed per core, such as Oracle.

One cost-savings approach we often see is server consolidation. This involves a company reducing its number of physical servers and using virtualization and load balancing to better utilize what resources they have. Typically, this also involves moving to a single vendor to gain better pricing leverage. If you take an extreme approach to this, you will have to find a platform that can host your mainframe-like applications and your distributed workloads; the truth is that the only platform capable of that is the mainframe. More typically, we’d expect to see companies move toward a single distributed platform plus the mainframe, but offloading work to Linux on System z can ease that transition.

4. Nothing virtualizes like a mainframe. So, we’ve established that we need a robust virtualization platform to support our cloud initiatives and the mainframe can run the same Linux operating system you run today. In comparison to a distributed environment, the mainframe has amazing resilience, can utilize its resources to a much higher level, is more secure and can cost significantly less to own.

A real-life example illustrates this: One company based in the Middle East was already running a mainframe replicated to a backup data center. The distributed team was told they needed to also add a backup data center for their business-critical Linux systems. To accommodate that many additional servers, they would have had to open a new backup data center, but instead they chose to simply move those x86-based Linux environments to System z. They inherited the mainframe’s highly available environment, and saved millions of dollars and huge headaches.

5. If you need to communicate with z/OS, then it’s unbeatable. Many companies make a great case to just run generic Linux applications on System z but if your Linux applications also need to communicate with the systems running on z/OS, then the value proposition becomes even clearer. If your Linux applications are running on an IFL and are communicating with systems on z/OS, such as DB2 or CICS transactions, then the network traffic never leaves the mainframe, which gives you superb performance and the ultimate in network security. Note that your Linux on System z environments can also communicate with other non-System z instances in the same way as a distributed system.

Accelerating System z in the Cloud

It’s worth noting that in mainframe terms, Linux is a high-growth area. According to IBM, 50 percent of all mainframe capacity shipping today comes from specialty processors, mainly IFLs, and 50 percent of all new mainframe customers take delivery of mainframes that only contain IFLs.
Application design tools that automate deployment of Linux applications to both x86 and System z can empower you to accelerate service delivery to the “best fit” platform, while also addressing the growing need for scalability, reliability and security across your enterprise. It’s also valuable to have cross-platform tools that enable you to dynamically reconfigure resources across the enterprise for optimum cost and performance based on changing workloads and business requirements. Look for solutions that not only provide this platform flexibility, but have also been designed to fully leverage all the unique benefits of the mainframe, including ease of communicating with back-end z/OS systems.

The ability to programmatically drive the provisioning of Linux systems is an important factor. One key difference between a virtualized environment and the cloud is the ability to support a self-service front-end. Your Linux deployment and management solutions need the flexibility to be driven by external systems—to include provisioning, maintenance and de-provisioning the running system. You need the ability to not just clone a Linux environment but to change key aspects of your application and, even better, change attributes and resource usage of your application components.

The final part of the equation—the ability to de-provision a system at the end of its lifecycle—is possibly the most important and often overlooked step in the Linux management world. You should be able to programmatically stop execution of an environment or destroy it entirely, returning all resources to the central pool. Provisioning Linux environments is just part of the equation, but without the ability to easily catalog and quickly de-provision, you’re actually contributing to the virtual server sprawl problem.

Cloud has become a critical part of many IT infrastructures and as such it needs a robust platform on which to run. System z will provide that platform in a cost-effective, secure and robust fashion. It really does behoove companies to look closely at the mainframe as part of their enterprise cloud strategy.