Company: OpenConnect Systems

OpenConnect Systems has launched soa-Solution, a mainframe-to-service-oriented-architecture (SOA) suite designed to transform business process knowledge used throughout the extended enterprise into secure and complete mainframe services.

Western Reserve Group (WRG), a property/casualty carrier located in Wooster, Ohio, was involved in beta testing the product. Dan Pitcher, the carrier's vice president of IT, explains WRG has been seeking a common service to leverage across what the insurer views as completely separate and distinct applications but with similar core activities.

OpenConnect's soaSolution consists of three core components designed to improve return on legacy investment while eliminating the risk of migrating mainframe information and applications to SOAs. The components are soa-Comprehend, soaConfigure, and soaConnect.

WRG has been testing the Comprehend solution to establish the data, the maps, and the navigation routes of the carrier's back-end systems as well as systems the carrier has already Web enabled. Pitcher believes this component ultimately will improve the carrier's performance. WRG also has an auto reconnect script to be used when users get disconnected before they establish an online session. "It really was surprising to us 41 percent of the time there is an [online] disconnect," Pitcher says.

Speed and connections are going to become increasingly important as Web applications get more complex, contends Pitcher. "In essence, [the product] allows you to visualize the process and monitor it," he says.

There are other advantages that may not be in the forefront of what WRG is doing right now, explains Pitcher, but they will prove to be beneficial. "Because of the way the Open-Connect product works, [users] don't have to maintain [everything] in memory," he says. "We feel it is a resource efficiency issue for us."

The soaComprehend component is the cornerstone of the new suite as it captures and exploits the latent business process knowledge exercised daily in the enterprise to automate the creation of mainframe-to-SOA services. soaComprehend applies business process logic to observe user interactions with an organization's mainframe assets in a secure, noninvasive environment, revealing a detailed understanding of real-world application- and information-use patterns, OpenConnect explains. The resulting application use-map enables organizations to focus on SOA-enablement efforts on only high-use, high-opportunity areas of business process improvement.

The soaConfigure component allows organizations to harness business process logic to build better services and ensure rapid development and deployment. By leveraging business process knowledge available through the soaSolution, any developer, even one lacking either mainframe or Web experience, can create automatically appropriate SOA services based on either screen logic interfaces (SLI) or advanced direct-access methods using CICS direct interfaces (CDI), OpenConnect claims. The soaConfigure component eases implementation by reconciling the IT skill gaps that exist within organizations' business groups, which often do not house both the mainframe and Web expertise necessary to ensure seamless deployments.

Security is a value proposition of mainframe architectures, and the financial implications of security and regulatory compliance are growing concerns for corporations. Opening mainframe applications to SOA platforms has the potential to diminish an organization's ability to prevent unauthorized access and facilitate audit trails needed for security and compliance initiatives, the company notes.

The soaConnect component allows companies to access mainframe applications and information through an SOA delivery model while maintaining security. Whether this access is created through SLI or CDI, soaConnect allows for highly scalable, run-time access and employs strict security parameters, including access administration based on end-user credentials, source IP, and time-of-day considerations.

"Everything we do at OpenConnect–from R&D efforts through deployment–is focused on one key competitive differential: providing the best customer value on the market," says Edward M. Peters, CEO of OpenConnect. "While solutions providers are flooding the market with so-called mainframe-to-SOA offerings, OpenConnect has pioneered the specific business process logic and security innovations necessary to ensure customers can leverage the efficiencies and savings of SOAs with lowest possible risk."

The OpenConnect product can simplify matters for carriers, according to Pitcher. "It can define and generate the XML templates directly from copy books," he says. "If we make a change to the mainframe system in one of the copy books, [the system] automatically can discover that change and dynamically generate an update to the data dictionary."