Enabling SOA
"Our strategy is to move to a Service Oriented Architecture to gain competitive advantage"
The existing COBOL applications are working well but the IT strategy is to adopt a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to be able to satisfy strategic demands and initiatives like:
- IT must be able to deliver the new functionality the business requires in hours and days, not months and years
- To support our merger and acquisition strategy we need to provide a single customer view while reducing duplication by rapid consolidation and systems integration
- Our enterprise architecture assumes we will be delivering IT on a heterogeneous environments and SOA is seen as key to maximizing IT responsiveness via re-use
Servicing requirements via re-use
Typically the rational for an organization investing in the adoption of a SOA is to enable IT to respond faster to business needs by constructing improved or new applications using existing services rather than re-writing code from scratch.
As the founding principles of SOA is the re-use of working services rather than always writing new services, it is quite contrary that some organizations consider re-writing working COBOL applications as a pre-requisite to getting to SOA.
To ensure organizations do not make this mistake, Micro Focus has again innovated in this area to provide tooling to rapidly re-use and deploy COBOL services within SOA.
Many of our process and system integration capabilities provide the low level infrastucture for our extensive SOA support but in addition Micro Focus provides
- Specific development tools to enable existing COBOL developers to quickly expose COBOL programs and routines as services and generate all the required infrastructure code, like WSDL, to enable publication of the COBOL service into your specific SOA architecture
- Deployment capabilities to enable these new services to be deployed in any SOA architecture including a Web services based SOA either natively within Micro Focus’ web services execution engine or on top of .NET or J2EE
- Similar development and deployment support not just for COBOL but for IBM CICS and IMS mainframe based transactions
Enabling SOA
By combing all these capabilities with our multiple high performance deployment options, training and services Micro Focus offers unparallel flexibility and support for "SOA enabling" COBOL applications on any current platform and deploying the services on any future platform.
Micro Focus can therefore enable re-use of close to 100% of working COBOL systems within a SOA in an incredibly low risk fashion which can deliver results faster than using any other approach available.
