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Progress DataDirect: Progress DataDirect Extends the Advantages of Event-Driven Architectures to Mainframe Customers With Compl

^{Published on 2009-08-24 06:24:22, Last Modified on 2009-08-24 06:24:27 - Market Wire}
 

DENVER, CO and BEDFORD, MA--(Marketwire - August 24, 2009) - [ Progress DataDirect ], the data infrastructure division of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: [ PRGS ]) and provider of premium, vendor-independent data access and integration technologies, today announced at the [ SHARE Conference ] its support for event processing capabilities available in the IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS)Transaction Server (TS) version 4.1, allowing organizations that rely on System z mainframes to more fully exploit the benefits of event-driven architectures.

IBM mainframes are the dominant platform for financial services and serve as a vital infrastructure component for many industries, including manufacturing, telecommunications and state and local government institutions. With cross-industry appeal, the top 50 worldwide banks and 22 of the top U.S. retailers run IBM System z. IBM CICS is one of the most widely used mainframe application hosting environments in the world, and as such is an environment rich in business meaningful events.

With the launch of CICS TS v4.1, IBM has included new event technologies to enable CICS to be configured to feed business event processing engines and business dashboards without the need for application change. CICS event processing is focused on application events of significance to the business, rather than systems management or IT events. The primary intent of this function is to allow existing applications to be non-invasively instrumented for events, so that events can be produced by the applications without the need for any code changes. The ability to generate business events without changing application programs both reduces cost and complexity and delivers compliant flexible business solutions.

Progress Software, through its [ Progress® Apama® ] event processing and [ Progress® DataDirect® Shadow® ] products, provides a comprehensive, end-to-end solution to complement and extend CICS TS v4.1 events. The Apama product offers a flexible, Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform for building event-driven applications. Apama event processing monitors rapidly moving event streams, detects and analyzes important patterns and acts in sub-millisecond time. With Apama event processing, CICS business events now can be correlated and analyzed in real-time, providing new levels of decision-making that dramatically improve operational responsiveness. Forrester Research recently named the Apama product as a standout leader in the CEP platform market in [ "The Forrester Wave™: Complex Event Processing Platforms, Q3 2009 Report." ]

The DataDirect Shadow platform is a single foundation architecture that supports all industry-standard requirements for integrating mainframe data, business logic and screens with SOAs and/or data-centric applications. Within the DataDirect Shadow product is a complete facility for the real-time capture and publication of events that occur within mainframe databases including DB2 for z/OS, VSAM, IMS/DB, CA-IDMS or Adabas. The DataDirect Shadow platform complements the CICS TS v4.1 out-of-the-box event capabilities with the ability to persist and deliver CICS events over MQ and/or HTTP/HTTPS; and to augment CICS generated events with database events that collectively provide rich and contextual information that can be further analyzed by Apama event processing. The DataDirect Shadow product not only captures and persists all events, it provides capabilities to filter, aggregate and enrich events to increase the context and business meaning of the technical database change.

The DataDirect Shadow platform's patent-pending technology for reducing mainframe integration costs enables all processing related to events to be diverted from the mainframe General Purpose Processor (GPP) to the System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) specialty engine. This capability was developed in close partnership with the IBM System z group and therefore does not cause IBM or any other third-party code to become zIIP-enabled.

Additional Support for CICS TS v4.1

CICS TS v4.1 introduces a wide range of technical and operational capabilities. In addition to the support for business events, the DataDirect Shadow platform provides support for key features within CICS TS v4.1 that simplify development, systems management and installation between the two products. Additional support includes:

 -- Integration with CICS Explorer - The CICS Explorer is an Eclipse-based systems management tool framework for CICS. Shadow Studio is an Eclipse- based integration administration and systems management tool for all DataDirect Shadow mainframe resources. In support of the CICS Explorer, the Shadow Studio can now be accessed from within CICS Explorer. -- Utilization of Bundles - A bundle is a collection of CICS resources, artifacts, references, and a manifest that users can deploy into a CICS region to represent an application. The DataDirect Shadow platform utilizes CICS bundle support to simplify customer installation and configuration of the DataDirect Shadow software into CICS environments. 

"The majority of Fortune 500 and major government entities use CICS running on z/OS for their core business functions. The addition of event capture support in CICS TS v4.1 will undoubtedly increase the interest in events and CEP for mainframe customers," said Gregg Willhoit, chief architect at Progress DataDirect. "By capturing mainframe-based events in real-time and offloading the event-capture processing to the zIIP specialty engine, the DataDirect Shadow product can react to a rapidly changing business environment while helping lower mainframe TCO and providing a more streamlined integration within the context of SOA."

Progress DataDirect at SHARE

Gregg Willhoit will deliver the presentation, "The Next Wave of SOA: Real-Time Events and CICS TS v4.1" session #0902 at the SHARE Conference in Denver, Monday, Aug. 24 at 11:00 a.m. The presentation will explore the ease in which CICS TS v4.1 can be combined with an event-enabled middleware like DataDirect Shadow to create an enriched business event that can be easily transported via multiple protocols to provide low-latency mainframe intelligence to drive BI, BAM or CEP applications.

Progress DataDirect is participating sponsor of the CICS's 40th anniversary celebration and to the IBM System zZone activities at the SHARE Conference. Product information and technology demonstrations will be available in the Exhibition area, at the Progress DataDirect booth #502.

About Progress DataDirect

Progress DataDirect 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 Progress® DataDirect® products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC™ and ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on Progress DataDirect to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems and to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration. For more information, visit [ www.datadirect.com ].

Progress, Apama, DataDirect, and Shadow are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its affiliates or subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All Java and Java-related marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.