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Big Blue Reinvests in Big Iron


New IBM software offerings modernize the mainframe

By David Worthington
December 1, 2007 — 
IBM launched the modern mainframe in 1964. Four decades later, mainframes are still an important part of Big Blue’s business—so much a part that in 2006, it invested US$100 million in a five-year cross-company initiative to make its System z mainframe easier to manage and program.

That effort, dubbed Mainframe Simplification, has borne new fruit. On Nov. 7, IBM announced an updated software portfolio for System z that includes legacy code modernization software, compilers and tools to leverage legacy code.

David Locke, director of go-to-market offerings for IBM Rational, explained that three things motivated IBM to reinvest in the mainframe: its belief that the mainframe is strong and well, competition from other mainframe tool makers, and the notion that service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables customers to leverage existing code in a modern way.

Some of the results have been added to the Rational lineup. IBM Rational Developer for System z 7.1, a rebranded WebSphere product, helps developers transition a range of applications—IBM z/OS, IBM CICS, IBM IMS, IBM WebSphere and batch—to SOA. Developers assemble components from existing mainframe assets.

IBM Rational Transformation Workbench 3.1 parses COBOL code to determine where components start and end, said Loche. “Manually parsing code takes a long time. Transformation Workbench finds business logic,” he added.

IBM Rational Business Developer Extension 7.0 is also a rebranded WebSphere product. It’s a productivity tool for developers that enables them to program System z applications without learning COBOL or Java, by leveraging IBM’s Enterprise Generation Language (EGL). The developer can choose to generate either language at compile time.

EGL is a fourth-generation procedural programming language that is geared toward business-oriented developers, according to the company.

The new Rational products provide a common infrastructure that Loche said will reduce costs for programming managers. “Having developers working in isolation is not good,” he added.

At compile time, IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS 4.1 and Enterprise PL/I for x/OS 3.7 integrate System z applications with Web-oriented business processes. Software Configuration and Library Manager Advanced Edition for z/OS 1.2 provides a centralized configuration management solution for applications when they are deployed.


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