www.tekwits.com

Legacymainframe Blog is now enhanced to multi blog/mult author system and it is working @ www.tekwits.com. your email subscription should still work from there.. Keep reading and happy moments always…

Dear Friends & Readers – Message From Vivin

Dear Friends & readers,

We have reached significant milestone in our knowledge sharing world. With your significant participation & active involvement we have reached this place. To enhance the features of our blog, we have moved to a new interface which is quite stable and very interactive. Just a screen & interface changes, but business would be as usual..

We can now assemble more comfortably at www.tekwits.com. Lets share our views/thoughts/news/trends here in user friendly format. Like me more authors can create their own blog, forums, polls, pages, even you say story here..You would be receiving the email updates as usual thru your email..

A unique oppurtunity from tekwits..You can be a author of any blog here..can be a moderator of an forum..can post news/trends/polls…just ask questions..whatever you are doing here would generate revenue without any additional effort from your end. Tekwits is trying to implement paypal/payment system to generate revenue for authors like you..whoever post here their artifacts(could be blogs/forums/forum questions/forums answers/polls/news/trends..etc) here would have a unique id mapped to paypal system and would get cashed.

Happy reading.

Thanks

Vivin – Tekwits mainframe author

 

Mainframe = Kicking Technology??

In an New York Times article of March 28th, the words of Steward Alsop, who predicted that the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1996 were put in context.

 

The mainframe was use as one example how “old” technology proved to be a strong survivor together with Radio, railways and the most modern one, print media. All these “old” technologies were supposed to be replaced by new ones like television, cars & trucks and the Web respectively.

 

One of the conclusions is that, to survive, these “old” technologies all have some sort of enduring advantage that is not replaced by its “successor”. And for the mainframe, this typically was the rock-solid stability and security to run vital transactions, while at the same time it allowed companies to integrate “new technology” like the Web & SOA transactions.

 

The most important conclusion was that the business decisions matter most. People tend to overestimate the importance of technological innovation and underestimate the role of business judgment. “The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism”.

Why parallel access can not be done(Database were offline while access Online)

Perpetual rounds of mergers and acquisitions, organizational change and compliance have all taken their toll, leaving firms susceptible to fraud, inefficiencies, and mistakes. The greater the change, the greater the risk exposure, according to research commissioned by ACL Services.

Just under half the 54 UK, US, and German IT and telecoms companies surveyed said they had either been through a company or departmental merger or an acquisition.

“Even seemingly simple changes to business structures, such as the merger of a department or a move to a shared services center, can involve massive financial consolidation and upheaval. Constant change equals greater risk and businesses need to have much tighter systems and monitoring in place to manage both,” said Harald Will, president and CEO of ACL.

Almost half the respondents said they believed their financial systems had been undermined by business operational changes, and one in three felt they were exposed to regular finance department errors.

This poor risk management had left 5% of respondents out of pocket, while the patchy compliance controls of another 5% had led to fines from auditors.

Only one in 10 firms said they were using the continuous auditing and monitoring technology needed to tackle these risks, while the others relied instead on ad hoc analysis.

IBM mainframe adds Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand links

Ten weeks after unveiling the System z10 mainframe, IBM on Tuesday announced that new Gigabit Ethernet hardware for LAN connectivity and new InfiniBand coupling links will be available May 30.

Mainframe LAN connectivity is being provided with the OSA-Express3, which includes a new microprocessor and PCI adapter “designed for high-speed communication in the enterprise backbone or between campuses, to connect server farms, or to consolidate file servers onto z10 EC (enterprise class),” IBM says in an announcement to customers. 

In conjunction with announcing new InfiniBand links and OSA-Express3, IBM said it is bolstering its services to help data center managers avoid the pitfalls of improper planning.

staff with Cobol skills attracted the best rates of pay

UK IT market is in danger of losing a huge portion of its workforce to overseas rivals as companies fail to evoke staff loyalty.

Almost two-thirds (66 per cent) of IT staff are looking for employment opportunities outside the UK, according to a survey of 4,967 UK professionals by recruitment firm Computer People.

In the UK, staff with Cobol skills attracted the best rates of pay, earning an annual average salary of £41,870.

Cisco skills were at the bottom of the scale, with employees earning an average of £32,320 per year.

This compares with the overall, full-time sector average of £35,160. Across the industry, the single largest pay bracket is £40,000 to £50,000, with 15 per cent of IT staff remunerated at that level.

Micro Focus Upgrades SOA Express to Support Direct Mainframe CICS Deployment

Micro Focus(R) (LSE.MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, today announced the availability of SOA Express 8.0. The new version adds support for direct deployment into IBM’s Customer Information Control System (CICS),

enabling users to accelerate the deployment of Web services by reusing their existing CICS TS mainframe infrastructure in a simplified and even faster 2-Tier model. This additional support provides customers with more options for their service oriented architecture (SOA) deployment environment. In addition to CICS, SOA Express supports SOA deployments over .Net and J2EE application servers. As a result, organizations are able to quickly and more easily migrate existing, core applications to an SOA as Web services regardless of platform or technology base.

SOA provides a strategic route to web enablement, integration and modernization of existing applications, providing a significantly more rapid delivery of new business initiatives than rewrite alternatives. Micro Focus SOA Express enables the reuse and modernization of existing mainframe applications without code changes by unlocking the business logic embedded within these applications and delivering them to an SOA. Standards based Web services can then be utilized by teams across the organization rendering proven COBOL business logic accessible to Java, .NET and Web teams for extension across the enterprise.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina is using SOA Express to replace their existing Web and desktop enablement solution. “The ability to provide our customers and the customer service staff with rapid and accurate access to information is core to our business. SOA Express has enabled us to deliver Web and desktop access with dramatically improved performance on our platform of choice,” said Keith Wild, Director of Internal Resource Management at BC/BSSC.