IBM tries regenerating mainframe software community
8th May 2006
By Tony Baer
Citing the all-too-familiar numbers that the mainframe remains alive and
quite well, IBM Corp is rolling out a blitz to address the lack of
software, third party support, and skills base.
The announcement, first disclosed at an analyst briefing in New York,
covered products from IBM's WebSphere, Tivoli, and Rational brands, plus
various initiatives aimed at rebuilding the mainframe community itself.
Available immediately, IBM is releasing Rational development and runtime
tools for COBOL. It follows up in June with the release of WebSphere
Process Server and the WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. Later in the
year, IBM will release DB2 Viper (the database that adds XML as a native
data type), WebSphere Portal 6.0, and Tivoli Federated Identity Manager.
Some of these products have unique features. For instance, the Rational
COBOL generator isn't a COBOL IDE per se. Instead, it is a development
environment for Enterprise Generation Language, a simplified version of
COBOL developed by IBM that targets development of forms-based
applications to simplify data access. With EGL, you can generate COBOL
on the back end while generating JSP and Java servlets on the commerce
server end.
EGL is not new, but the Rational development tools based on the
mainframe are.
With EGL, IBM is trying to reach beyond the limited population of COBOL
programmers so e commerce apps for accessing legacy data can be written
more quickly. Otherwise, if you have to wait for the limited pool of
COBOL developers, who are probably busy in maintenance mode, the apps
might otherwise never get written.
Making EGL more available is part of a larger strategy to broaden the
skills pool for mainframe development. IBM cited IDC statistics that the
population of COBOL developers has actually stabilized since 2002.
Actually, the fact that COBOL populations haven't declined recently
might be seen as a good sign, since it is not exactly a popular topic in
computer science curricula.
According to IBM stats, mainframe data is doubling annually. That alone
makes IBM quite concerned about the looming skills gap. Consequently,
another obvious pillar is aiming at student programs.
IBM is sponsoring development of new courseware. According to Jim Rhyne,
an IBM distinguished engineer in the System z group, the new curricula
won't necessarily be restricted to teaching COBOL. Instead, it will deal
with topics like designing and managing systems for extreme scalability.
Additionally, IBM is sponsoring a new global "Master the Mainframe"
contest aimed at students, plus new university courseware.
Another pillar is boosting ISV support. IBM will expand no-cost access
to IBM IT architects, plus the usual array of IBM PartnerWorld joint
marketing, sales, and technical support.
Looking forward, IBM is also ramping up work on mainframe SOA. According
to Rhyne, in many cases, it would make more sense to expose CICS
transactions as web services, rather than go through the intermediate
stage of encapsulating them as Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs).
Compounding the issue, IBM is suggesting that in many cases, it makes
more sense to deploy collapse some of the functionality now distributed
to outer tiers back to the mainframe. "If I have a component that
interacts with data, why shouldn't I try to collocate the component in
the same place where the data resides?" asked Rhyne, explaining the
rationale.
According to Rhyne, IBM will base much of its work to expose CICS
transactions as web services on work being done in emerging Service
Component Architectures (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) which seek
to apply component-based development to web services, are part of this
direction.
For IBM, the obvious motivation of all this is to protect its mainframe
business, which continues to grow at a compound rate of roughly 20%
annually. Altogether, IBM's software thrust, adding its z versions of
its own offerings, partner programs, and student initiatives are
intended to make sure that System z growth does not occur in a vacuum.
Source:
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=EB538F8B-6FA0-425B-BA7A-2
F7A9977FDAA&z=rc_ServersandMainframes