IBM i Integration

Just what is true Web integration on the System I, and how can SOA help companies achieve it to reap the benefits? Illuminata’s senior analyst Wayne Kernochen, responds to those questions and argues that, “If people want to get the biggest bang for the buck with SOA, they will ‘webservicize’ existing System i applications.”

Carol Woodbury, a founder and president of SkyView Partners, shares her thoughts about the investment that System I shops must make in security and compliance, and offers some recommendations for strategies to ensure success.

System I users have a lot invested in their OS/400 applications, but they know they need to modernize these applications and to meet new business demands and to integrate with other applications across the enterprise. This white paper presents a pragmatic approach for accomplishing this, without the need to implement complex technologies or programming languages, keeping the System I at the platform of choice for legacy and new business applications.

Users of the System I need to bring their applications into the world around it—a world buzzing with Web-enablement, with the transfer of data between departments and customers and suppliers, with moves towards service-oriented architectures (SOA) that deliver business efficiency and agility, and with on-the-spot, real-time decision-making that business expects today. This can only happen with true Web integration—but what does that really mean, and how can it be achieved without adopting complex strategies that are expensive, risky, and resource-intensive? This white paper presents a solution.

Keeping up with regulatory compliance and mandates that come from outside the organization threaten to consume significant resources from your organization, drawing your attention away from the projects and initiatives that you have defined as those that will increase your individual business advantage. However, deployment of a security plan, along with third-party tools and an effective development platform can dramatically decrease the time it takes to implement and maintain these compliance mandates, resulting in more resources available to devote to your core business.

For many companies, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is proving to be an extremely attractive and efficient alternative to buying or building on-site, enterprise applications—especially where those applications are not industry-specific. One of the great barriers, however, to maximizing the value of SaaS applications is the challenge of integrating them with in-house applications, especially when real-time integration is necessary. This white paper presents a strategy for meeting that challenge with SOA-based integration solutions.