BELLEVUE, Wash.—Feb. 2, 2004 — Attachmate Corporation, the only all-mainframe connectivity expert in the industry, released myEXTRA!™ Smart Connector Mainframe Edition v4.0.2, bringing direct access to mainframe data sources—including VSAM, IMS/DB, DB2®, Adabas—as well native, transactional access to CICS® and IMS/TM applications. Based on a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), myEXTRA! Smart Connector Mainframe Edition makes it easy to integrate mainframe-based data sources and legacy applications with any modern client.
Fast, real-time access to mainframe-based data
Smart Connector Mainframe Edition provides the fastest, most productive way to access mainframe assets to develop new applications, work with popular integration brokers, and use standard SQL queries to join data across disparate systems. “The benefit of our GUI-based and SOA-approach is reduced time, cost, and complexity of integration efforts, repositioning mainframes within contemporary business environments,” said Markus Nitschke, Attachmate® vice president of marketing and product management.
Enabling legacy applications to achieve a Service Oriented Architecture
“Companies today are trying to SOA-enable their legacy applications so they can be reused in new applications,” Nitschke continued. The Smart Connector Mainframe Edition offers extensive choices, so customers can enable Web Services directly on the mainframe, enable the mainframe on a mid-tier server in front of the mainframe, and/or choose which connection to the back-end component they need. “Attachmate has a solution for all of these scenarios,” Nitschke said, “so our customers can enable any – or all – of their systems to participate in an SOA environment.”
Features and Benefits
CICS & IMS Transactional Connectivity – Mainframe-resident connectors provide fast, transactional access to legacy programs developed for the CICS and IMS environments. Standard transaction protocols (XA, OLE) enable underlying resources to participate in client-managed transactions, including two phase commit for financial processing and host-initiated events. XML-based event generation and routing enables legacy applications to interact asynchronously and bi-directionally with other enterprise applications.
Direct Data Access Connectivity – The Smart Connector Mainframe Edition provides pre-built drivers to access Adabas, DB2, IMS/DB, and VSAM that are easy to install, configure, and optimize without putting a strain on system resources. The server automatically optimizes complex queries to minimize CPU and network utilization, presents non-relational data as relational data, and gives developers the opportunity to build customized views of federated data for reporting.
Studio, a GUI-based configuration and management tool – A graphical console manages adapter configuration, metadata import and testing, and runtime management. The Studio improves productivity by providing a single look and feel to all activities and enables developers to seamlessly move between tasks, managing legacy systems with ease.
Reduced TCO – The Smart Connector Mainframe Edition reduces total cost-of-ownership, and is simple to install, tune, and administer, with lower memory and processor usage footprint. Providing easy-to-use development and management tools for wrapping legacy business logic, the product connects out-of-the-box to mainframe-based applications and data sources.
Security support – Smart Connector Mainframe Edition supports all existing security mechanisms – RACF®, CA-ACF2®, and CA-Top Secret® – that have made the mainframe and its data sources the stable platform that Fortune 1000 organizations continue to rely on. A modular architecture enables customers to install once and proceed opportunistically and incrementally, adding drivers and adapters for the legacy resources they need to integrate.
Product and download information is available at www.attachmate.com/Evals/Evaluate.htm.