Attachmate Tunes Verastream for Mainframe-SOA Projects

Longtime mainframe integration firm Attachmate Corp. this week released an update to its Verastream Host Integrator to greatly simplify the complexity of legacy-to-SOA integration, as well as lower the time, cost and risk of such projects.

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: Host Integrator, Mainframe, Verastream Host Integrator, Legacy, Bice, SOA, Developers,


Attachmate Corp. this week unveiled an updated version of Verastream Host Integrator that will greatly simplify the complexity of legacy-to-SOA integration, as well as lower the time, cost and risk of such projects.

Attachmate's Verastream Host Integrator 6.6 adds features to cut out the need for complex coding, enable team members to work better together and adds support for NIST's Federal Information Processing Standards, a security requirement for government users. The latest VHI also provides all these services in a highly-scalable, non-invasive way.

"SOA is driving customers to look at ways to access valuable legacy assets in a secure way. Many of our customers are finding that their SOA projects are not complete unless their legacy systems can participate," Tom Bice, Attachmate's director of product marketing told IDN.

So, the question for Bice and others at Attachmate as they set out their Verastream upgrade plans was this:
How can enterprise IT accomplish mainframe SOA in a safe and efficient manner, and bring together mid-tier and mainframe IT professionals to design, test, deploy and maintain?
While there are a growing number of mainframe-SOA solutions in the marketplace, Attachmate customers found most solutions made them make some painful trade-offs - and, in fact, some trade-offs were simply too onerous, and so their mainframe-SOA project remains unfinished.

"Too often, customers are forced to consider solutions that don't address all their needs," Bice said. Customers listed these deficiencies:

  • too many dependencies on the backend,
  • too difficult to maintain,
  • don't align the SOA and mainframe groups, and
  • require too much coding, and
  • are too invasive into critical mainframe/legacy resources

    Attachmate's VP of marketing Eric Varness described the goals of Verastream Host Integrator 6.6 in a statement. The upgrade "modernizes mainframe functionality to help alleviate many of the challenges associated with legacy integration, simplifying the process whether its' within Web, mobile or contact center applications solutions environments. Integrating legacy applications into SOA are traditionally viewed as an extremely complex process that requires developers with significant expertise,"

    Among Verastream Host Integrator 6.6 top upgrade features:

  • Team Modeling -- An enhanced model import functionality allows multiple developers to work on a single model and import needed portions of one project into other projects.

  • Native .NET Client Support -- .NET client support enables Verastream Host Integrator 6.6 to work seamlessly with 32 and 64-bit operating systems.

  • FIPS Validation -- Crypto libraries are now validated and FIPS certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) providing compliance with the organization's security and data-protection guidelines. Many federal government agencies mandate that sensitive data be encrypted with this standard.

  • WS-I Compliant Web Services -- WS-I compliant Web services provide flexibility to accommodate new standards and capabilities of the Web services specification. Ensures compatibility with other standards based SOA infrastructure such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), SOA governance, and Business Process Management tools.

  • Windows Server 2008 Support --Verastream Host Integrator 6.6 extends its support to the Windows Server 2008 platform. Verastream earlier supported Linux, Solaris and AIX,

    Bringing Efficiency and Safety to Mainframe SOA Projects
    Verastream's "non-invasive approach" to mainframe-SOA integration gives customers an extra level of safety and security in an SOA-legacy project, Bice told IDN, because "they can maintain and preserve reliability and don't have to mess with directly with their [legacy] data or business logic."

    The Verastream approach SOA-legacy also is extremely efficient, Bice said. At DHL, for instance, IT was able to design, test and deploy an SOA-legacy project with just one Attachmate developer, and a few corporate mainframe and policy staff, he said.

    "That's another nice thing about how we've designed our [Verastream] support for team development," Bice said.

    Companies can "easily divide up the labor" between professionals - web, integration and legacy, Bice told IDN. The whole point is that downstream developers "don't have to know much about mainframe applications or business logic," while easily enabling the mainframe expert "to capture the workflows needed and generate web services that can be easily consumed by the [downstream] web or integration developers," Bice added.

    Verastream Host Integrator 6.6 is available immediately
    An online demo is available.


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