When it comes to changing business demands, the enterprise IT community has been quick to recognize the advantages of a service oriented architecture. The SOA building blocks are the services available through well-defined, standardized interfaces such as a web services interface.
Organizations striving to optimize their IT resources soon realize that they need to make existing programs available as reusable services in order to achieve factorial gains. Because mainframes play such an important role in high-availability, high-volume transaction processing, you can expect certain IT questions when the topic turns to service-enabling mainframe assets. Paramount among those questions is “how will we support those transactions?”
This white paper assumes a working knowledge of the usual procedures for safeguarding a transaction (such as a money transfer between two accounts or a ticket booking with two separate airlines). Within that context, it addresses the challenges of exposing external transactions to a mainframe, then presents possible solutions to these challenges, and ultimately dispels the notion that standard web services are required in an SOA.