Unparalleled cost savings and reliability of IBM mainframe fuel customer and ISV investment.
IBM has announced new System z software to enable companies to drive down IT costs while increasing business flexibility and improving service. IBM announced it plans to release approximately 30 new software technology enhancements in 2009 that extend the advantages of using System z as a platform for developing, deploying and running today's applications and business data.
The announcement is part of IBM's ongoing pursuit to help customers simplify their environment and reduce costs by migrating scattered applications and data onto a lower cost, more scalable and manageable platform.
The software initiative spans IBM's branded product lines for application architecture, development, and delivery; business intelligence and database management; transaction management and IT service management.
Market adoption of System z as a platform for new applications is demonstrated by the growth in ISV interest in the IBM mainframe. Over the last year, more than 150 new ISVs have embraced the platform, and more than 1,000 new vendor applications were added.
ISVs recently deploying applications on System z include SAP, Chordiant, Temenos, i-flex, ACI, and Norkom.
"In the last year, Chordiant has added System z (both z/OS and Linux) support for each of our main platforms by making our call center platform Chordiant Foundation Server and our intelligent dialog decisioning platform Chordiant Decision Management now available on the IBM mainframe," said Marchai Bruchey, vice president and chief marketing officer at Chordiant Software. "We're experiencing a significant pipeline interest from our customers to add front-office, customer interaction workloads on to System z."
IBM today announced 12 of the 30 software products and enhancements for System z.
For application architecture, development, and delivery:
IBM Rational System Architect v11.3 and Rational Focal Point for Product and Portfolio Management v6.4 enable better decision-making and impact analysis using blueprints of strategy, processes and IT infrastructure and their inter-dependencies. The new capabilities will help maximize budget and resources with critical business and IT collaboration, and provide the enterprise planning and risk analysis necessary for successful enterprise consolidation and transformation initiatives.
IBM Rational Developer for System z v7.6 helps improve developer productivity, lowers training costs and reduces mainframe MIPs consumption. The new version supplies integrations with Rational Team Concert for System z v2.0, CICS v4.1, SCA, IBM Problem Determination Tools and third party SCM solutions. Together, these capabilities allow customers to use IBM's premier Integrated Developer Environment for accelerating development of new workloads across multiple platforms and languages on System z.
IBM Rational Team Concert for System z v2.0, based on the IBM Jazz technology platform, enables collaborative, agile development among distributed and Mainframe development teams building Java, C/C++, COBOL, PL/I, and EGL applications. The preview version now integrates with IBM Rational Developer for System z further strengthening support for building cross-platform applications.
For business intelligence and new database technology, recently announced and future IBM software products include:
InfoSphere Warehouse for System z adds core data warehousing and analytics capability to DB2 for z/OS, including optimized multidimensional reporting and analysis. In addition it enables universal access to clients such as Excel and Cognos.
Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z v8.4 now provides a single view across virtually any data source.
The next Version of DB2 for z/OS will boost performance, significantly lower administration and maintenance requirements, while improving the efficiency of application developers and database administrators.
Available later this year, IMS 11 provides Open Database support which makes interaction with other applications and databases much simpler, faster, and more cost effective to implement.
For transaction management, recently announced IBM software products include:
CICS Transaction Server v4.1 delivers new features to help organizations respond to the demands of increased regulatory scrutiny, address changing demographics, and position themselves to take advantage of new growth opportunities. Existing CICS programs and resources can now participate in mashups, Web 2.0 and other situational applications. The CICS Explorer also simplifies the development and management of traditional and modern applications for integrating with IBM and third party tools.
WebSphere Business Events v6.2.1 for z/OS helps businesses detect, evaluate, and respond to the impact of business events based on the discovery of actionable event patterns. Users now have the ability to specify business events, and then capture and emit them from a CICS application, without the need to change the application.
For IT Service Management:
Through multiple releases, Tivoli OMEGAMON provides integrated monitoring throughout the enterprise to assure the highest quality application performance. It reduces labor intensive analysis and speeds time to repair, often identifying potential problems before they require investigation.
Tivoli Security Management for z/OS helps simplify security administration and user management, establish security policy controls, and automate auditing and compliance reporting. It enhances overall security posture to reduce risks and improve reliability, and minimizes costs with increased productivity and operational efficiencies when consolidating security.
Tivoli Key Lifecycle Management for z/OS delivers platform independent, extreme security for corporate information which can be accessed by thousands of applications inside and outside the enterprise, while combining automated management to minimize required maintenance.
Tivoli Workload Scheduler v8.5 now provides new, more intelligent scheduling, boosting throughput with minimal human intervention through increased automation.
Customers and ISVs continue to embrace System z
"Temenos sees the System z market as a major growth opportunity. Temenos Core Banking, targeted at large domestic retail operations with a SOA roadmap looking to gradually replace key 'banking enterprise services', running on WebSphere on zOS fully exploits the specialty engine architecture of System z," said Greg Green, senior vice president of Core Banking at Temenos. "In addition, T24 our flagship universal banking platform with unparalleled breadth of functionality, running on Linux and using DB2 for zOS, gives the bank extreme flexibility on a modern architecture."
For customers in the banking sector, IBM and SAP offer a reference architecture for running for SAP Solutions on System z with IBM's WebSphere, Tivoli, and Information Management products. Customers can download the guidelines on how to optimize SAP on System z based on real-world experiences gained at large-scale SAP implementations at major banks worldwide.
On May 27, IBM and University of North Carolina Health Care (UNCHC) announced their use of a data warehouse -- built on the IBM Health Integration Framework with InfoSphere and WebSphere software running on System z mainframe and System p computers -- to speed the development of new treatments for diseases such as diabetes, cystic fibrosis and cancer.
Recent IBM System z wins include 40 competitive accounts and System z adoption around the world, such as HDFC Bank in India, Russian Railways, Travelport, Donovan Data Systems (UK), Handelsbanken (Sweden), Daishi Bank (Japan), Sun Life Financial (Canada), Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia, among others.
In the US, Verizon Communications, Inc., a leader in delivering broadband and other wireline communication innovations to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers, is leveraging its Information Management Software on System z to execute 2.25 billion of transactions per month to support business growth.
In addition to customer adoption of System z, 600 schools worldwide have now joined IBM to offer coursework in the IBM System z enterprise servers. IBM has helped connect businesses that use mainframes with professors who teach the technology. Students learning IBM enterprise systems have secured opportunities with leading banks, such as Citigroup. Since 2004, more than 50,000 students have participated in mainframe education.
For more information about System z, visit http://www.ibm.com/mainframe. To get IBM Software product details, visit http://www.ibm.com/software.
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