SEATTLE, May 23, 2006 — AttachmateWRQ today announced the availability of Verastream Bridge Integrator, a CICS-focused integration solution that enables customers to rapidly transform business-critical CICS functionality into reusable services. New to the Verastream® product family, Verastream Bridge Integrator® software adds a simplified, yet highly efficient host resident option for CICS application access and marks a new phase in the Company’s expansion of the Verastream line of legacy integration solutions.
Verastream Bridge Integrator is the result of continuous development of AttachmateWRQ™ offerings to bring expanded integration and CICS capabilities, as well as operational and business benefits, to customers. Since, for many organizations, CICS holds the most critical and valued business processes available, Verastream Bridge Integrator ensures that customers can non-invasively extend these standards-based services for use in new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application development or integration projects.
“Verastream Bridge Integrator strengthens the attributes that IT cares about, including ease-of-use, transparency and flexibility,” said Randy Robinson, senior vice president of products and marketing at AttachmateWRQ. “By solving the need to provide seamless and reliable CICS application participation in the drive towards SOA, Verastream ensures that customers can leverage and service-enable their CICS assets more quickly and efficiently than ever before.”
The majority of world’s transactional data, in industries such as financial services, insurance and retail, rely on mainframe transaction monitors such as IBM CICS. Verastream Bridge Integrator extends the value of the mainframe and furthers the return on investment by service-enabling CICS assets.
Verastream’s new eclipse-based design environment was created specifically for the SOA or CICS developer to easily represent specific CICS business processes without requiring deep CICS skills. With Verastream, it is now possible to leverage the most efficient and reliable methods available for CICS application access. The solution addresses key customer requirements, including interoperability in heterogeneous IT environments, ease-of-use and mitigation of training costs and labor.
“IT is tasked with making mainframe applications easily and quickly accessible for companies and their employees,” said Dale Vecchio, research vice president for Gartner. “Host integration products enable developers to expose legacy data and business logic so they can create web-based applications without having to install code on user terminals.”
Verastream Bridge Integrator
Verastream Bridge Integrator gives developers direct access to CICS applications residing in or across CICS regions, via IBM Transaction Server v2.2 or higher. Unlike other industry solutions, Verastream Bridge Integrator does not require developers to rely on IBM CICS Universal Client libraries or expertise in COBOL intricacies to create new applications, making it quick and easy-to-use. Through a powerful modeling tool requiring only an intuitive understanding of target application, CICS application services can be built to accommodate any number of popular SOA technologies.
Key features of Verastream Bridge Integrator include:
- Broad client-platform support, including EJB, JCA RA, COM(+) and .NET-managed web services
- CICS logic access via 3270 bridge exits
- Direct access to 3270 applications spanning multiple CICS regions when using IBM Transaction Server v2.2 or higher
- Assignable Terminal ID for extended MRO support and state management
- Interception of CICS 3270 Terminal I/O, bypassing VTAM for faster processing
- Access and control over CICS applications with or without BMS maps
- No modifications to the CICS 3270 application or generation of BMS Maps
- Native, mainframe-resident connector running with IBM CICS Transaction Server and IBM CICS Web Services on OS/390
- Lightweight requestor/redirector that implements a simple API for stateless or stateful interactions
AttachmateWRQ Verastream works collaboratively or as a stand-alone tool along with the company’s host access, security and management products, enabling companies to extend the use of existing IT investments while adopting valuable new technologies to improve their businesses.
About AttachmateWRQ
AttachmateWRQ focuses on extending more information, to more people, in the most secure and manageable way possible. The leader in multi-host access and integration, the company enables organizations to maximize the value of their existing IT investments as they advance their long-term business and IT strategies. Headquartered in Seattle, AttachmateWRQ serves over 40,000 customers in nearly 60 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.attachmatewrq.com.