Poste Italiane Group Adopts Reflection for the Web for Smoother Mainframe Access

Recently, Poste Italiane Group, Italy’s leading postal services operator, needed a terminal emulation solution that would enable the management offices and branches to more quickly connect to mainframe applications from PCs using a three-tier architecture: PC-server-mainframe.

For Poste Italiane, the mainframe is central to business activities. Poste Italiane keeps all of its core business information on a mainframe host, including financial data, mobile telephony services data, and administrative information relating to all employees.

Modern Technologies Key

Present in all areas of Italy, Poste Italiane boasts a network of 5,500 ATMs, 14,000 post offices, and over 200 parcel and mail sorting centers. Poste Italiane provides crucial services to its customers—ordinary citizens, SMEs, large companies, and public administration offices—by designing and developing products for the management of collections and payments, communication, outsourcing, and logistics.

Within Post Italiane, fast, flexible modern technologies are key for operating easily and strategically, and for achieving integrated products and services accessible via multiple modes.

To achieve its objectives, Poste Italiane must enhance assets such as its logistics and ICT infrastructure, its management and payment systems, and its trustworthy image; as well as continue to expand its presence throughout the country.

A Fast, Flexible Solution

In 2009, Poste Italiane adopted Attachmate Reflection for the Web Enterprise Edition. “This emulation software lets the user connect directly from a browser to applications residing on the mainframe,” says Mario Nocera, who is in charge of the UNIX and Wintel operating systems at Poste Italiane. “About 20,000 Poste Italiane users rely on Reflection for the Web to access and edit this data, namely executive users at the post offices, HR offices, call center operators, and receptionists.”

In addition to improved access to the mainframe, Poste Italiane requested that its new terminal emulation solution would also include disaster recovery capabilities and guarantee minimum intervention by internal IT staff.

Now, Reflection for the Web Enterprise Edition allows Poste Italiane Group users to rapidly and securely access applications on the mainframe simply by clicking a link on their PCs. The product also guarantees a high level of technical support from Attachmate, with whom Poste Italiane has collaborated for several years.

More about Reflection for the Web

Reflection for the Web is an emulation software product that securely connects the browser user to applications residing on IBM, HP, UNIX, OpenVMS, and Unisys hosts. The powerful encryption and authentication functions guarantee secure distribution of host applications integrated into the public Internet. In addition, the software’s secure token authorization feature provides a layer of LDAP access control in front of the host applications, integrating them into a company’s LDAP-based security infrastructure without requiring anything to be installed or configured on the host.

The product is installed centrally and implemented on the web server so that it is immediately available to all browser users. When a user logs in following a server update, all the necessary updates are downloaded automatically. With Reflection for the Web, expensive and time consuming desktop-to-desktop management is no longer necessary.

Reflection for the Web is platform independent, and can be run on all popular browsers and on any operating system that supports Java, including Windows 7, Linux, and Mac OS X. The servers can be run on any operating system supported by Java, such as Windows, Linux, UNIX, zLinux, and z/OS.