Shadow Technical Resources
Mainframe Integration Technical Resources & Multimedia
Welcome to the Shadow technical resource and multimedia page. We've worked hard to provide you with numerous Technical Demos, Webinars, Podcasts and WhitePapers. Click through the below tabs to see more detail, and be sure to check back often - we are continually creating new resources.
Cost Effective Strategies for Mainframe Modernization
No question - mainframes continue to provide a secure, high-performance and scalable computing platform. However, as you know, mainframes are often isolated, so you face the challenge of extending mainframe data or applications to open systems without adding cost and complexity.
Join us as we show you mainframe modernization strategies that accelerate development and cut expenses. You’ll learn about cost-effective tools that enable interoperability with data integration and SOA infrastructures, so your mainframe can participate fully in diverse business and technology activities.
Expanding Your Market with Cost Effective Mainframe Data Connectivity
Customers demand access to data regardless of where it resides. DataDirect Technologies has forged its reputation by helping define industry standards for data connectivity. More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on DataDirect Technologies to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems.
But what if you need to expand your market to include access to data stored on mainframe systems? DataDirect has the answer with Shadow version 7, the industry’s only single, unified platform for mainframe integration.
Join us for this informative webinar where we explore the features and benefits of DataDirect’s Shadow version7, a new benchmark in mainframe data connectivity.
Mainframes at Your Service: Best Practices for Mainframe SOA Integration
What are the best practices for integrating mainframes into wider SOA and Web Services infrastructures?
The powerful applications and data for which mainframe systems are known can prove valuable in developing and expanding business services. The key to unveiling the full potential of the mainframe lies in choosing the correct middleware integration strategy.
Join Bloor Research analyst Martin Banks and DataDirect Technologies for this informative web seminar to learn how you can achieve the business advantages of mainframe SOA and data connectivity.
Orchestrate Business Efficiency with Mainframe Web Services and BPEL
Web services and SOA are helping to resolve the issue of technology interoperability for business, even to the point of allowing mainframe systems to seamlessly integrate with distributed platforms and applications. Building on this foundation, organizations are now turning to Web Services Orchestration and standards like Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to improve business efficiency.
In this webinar, you will learn how new tools are changing the mainframe landscape, making it easy and cost effective to create long running Web services using industry standard BPEL to allow the mainframe to more fully participate in cross platform process optimization. In addition, we will examine the new frontier of mainframe specialty engine exploitation that turns investments in the zIIP and zAAP engines into dramatic reductions in mainframe total cost of ownership.
Preparation for Migration to Shadow Version 7
DataDirect Technologies has released the latest version of its mainframe middleware software, Shadow version 7. This product includes a significant number of new features for mainframe SOA enablement and data connectivity.
Learn more about the features in Shadow version 7.
- Review key changes in the product with explanation by our experts
- Learn more about data connectivity - Upgrading to New Client Drivers
- Understand enhanced SOA support - Orchestration via BPEL
- Investigate lowering mainframe TCO via specialty engines
- Understand installation enhancements for WLM
- Learn to simplify migration and the scope of services available to assist
- Ask the Experts - participate in real-time Q&A and polls
Re-Discovering IT Optimization in Financial Services
Business and IT Collaboration in Tough Times
Business and IT leaders have never had more compelling reasons to work together than in facing today’s economic challenges. Both are confronted with severe budget constraints while simultaneously being challenged to rapidly integrate disparate entities and technologies in order to meet the demands of a new reality.
While many IT managers chase cost-cutting alone, leaders find ways to increase value at the intersection of IT and business, enabling efficient transformation through time-tested infrastructure technology including the mainframe. Technology leaders today face the real complexity of delivering value to new business architectures that do not natively align with IT architectures of the past - and do so with significantly lower TCO.
In this webcast we address the following key questions:
- What do business leaders need to understand about these concepts in aligning cost and performance expectations for the technologies used in their business?
- Which concepts are key to specific business value and which are more about broader IT performance?
- When should business leaders support new IT spending and when should they expect IT to leverage existing resources for new value?
- How can IT professionals find the efficiencies in order to support new mainframe related projects?
Shadow Tech Tips: Reducing the Cost of Mainframe Security
It is critical to maintain the security infrastructure of the mainframe when reusing legacy assets in new applications. Modern integration techniques including SOA and direct SQL access can introduce significant increases in repetitive authentication and authorization requests. Shadow introduces innovative technology to significantly reduce these mandatory security processes while providing increased performance and reduced CPU overhead and costs.
This webinar is a "hands-on" demonstration of the Shadow product exploring the Shadow Security Optimization and Management (SOM) feature. We will focus on:
- Understanding how SOA adoption & the SOAP protocol introduces new mainframe security overhead
- Exploring how Shadow can eliminate over 95% of redundant security requests
- Examining the cost savings of Security Optimization and zIIP exploitation through Shadow
Shadow Tech Tips: The Fundamentals of zIIP Exploitation
Advances in the System z platform and integration middleware are now available to simplify and dramatically lower the cost of mainframe integration. Shadow version 7 includes unique capabilities to offload significant portions of your integration workloads to the zIIP specialty engine.
This webinar is a "hands-on" demonstration of the Shadow product exploring how to:
- Build Web services with CICS, IMS, IDMS, or Natural utilizing business logic and screens
- Create SQL or Web services data queries using Adabas, DB2, IDMS or VSAM
- Identify and enable workloads for zIIP utilization
Breaking the SOA Price Barrier for Mainframes With zIIP Exploitation
The value of information technology is rapidly accelerating for organizations who rely on mainframe platforms - due in part to innovations in middleware design that are breaking down the economic barriers to mainframe participation in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).
Mainframe Executive Magazine and DataDirect Technologies recently surveyed more than 20,000 mainframe users to gather real-world feedback on specialty engine adoption and its impact. In this webinar, we will review the results of the industry survey, examine new technologies for zIIP exploitation and look at the latest mainframe TCO calculator for quantifying zIIP offload into MIPS dollar savings.
Join experts from Mainframe Executive, WinterGreen Research and DataDirect Technologies to learn how your organization can lower mainframe TCO and accelerate new mainframe SOA initiatives.
Significantly Increase Mainframe Web Services ROI
Rebecca Wettemann, VP of Nucleus Research presents a case study analysis of a global financial services firm that deployed DataDirect Shadow and its mainframe Web services technology at the early stages of its service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption. This strategy enabled the company to leverage existing mainframe assets while increasing developer productivity and the ability to deliver new applications to customers.
Results:
ROI: 150%
Payback: 11 months
Simplifying Mainframe Data Access for ISVs
Are your customers bearing the cost and time to prepare their data for access by your application? More importantly, can you leave this crucial step unknown as you work to prove your solution against the competition?
DataDirect Technologies addresses the challenge of mainframe integration with Shadow, a single, unified foundation architecture that simplifies and accelerates the integration of mainframe data, business logic, and screens with new Java, .NET or web applications.
The Next Wave of SOA: Real-Time Events and CICS TS v4.1
In this webinar, Gregg Wilhoit - Chief Software Architect for DataDirect Shadow, discusses:
- Extending SOA into Events
- The Business Case for Events
- CICS TS v4.1
- ISV Support from Progress Software
- Flexible Options to Support CICS
- And More!
The SOA Impact on Mainframe Data Integration
The intrinsic value of legacy data continues to drive the evolution of integration technologies. Yesterday's blunt instruments have been replaced by more intuitive, SOA-compliant integration tools that have the potential to dramatically expand the usefulness of mainframe data.
Organizations with mainframe systems rarely have a single database or application environment. Fully leveraging your investment in SOA often requires supporting multiple mainframe integration methods - ESB, SQL, SOAP, XML. Failure to address this challenge only leads to excessive integration complexity, cost and risk.
In this webinar we explore:
- How you can reduce integration complexity and cost
- How to expand your options for data utilization
- Results of latest zJournal audience survey
When Business Intelligence Meets Mainframe Data, Good Things Can Happen
Transforming data into real-time business intelligence starts with streamline access to data – regardless of where that data resides. When your project involves non-relational mainframe data, you can accelerate deployment and increase ROI with the combined solution of DataDirect Shadow and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.
Learn what other customers have already discovered about the benefits of real-time mainframe data access when coupled with Oracle’s premier Business Intelligence platform. Shadow’s industry standard access and built-in data mapping integrates seamlessly with Oracle BIEE for reduced complexity and faster results – and lower mainframe TCO with Shadow’s unique zIIP specialty engine exploitation.
Avoiding SOA Paralysis: Cutting The Costs of Mainframe SOA for Insurance
Has the juggernaut of SOA finally slowed, tripped up by the realities of today’s economics? There is no denying the value Service Oriented Architectures bring to an organization, particularly mainframe-heavy vertical industries like Insurance. Indeed, SOA’s ability to enable rapid, re-use and revitalization of legacy assets can have a distinct impact on the business. But what value is business agility if the technology expense or opportunity loss is too great a burden?
In this webcast, we will explore how insurance organizations can cost effectively utilize SOA to accelerate application modernization, essentially making SOA viable for the business. Join Insurance and Technology, Celent and DataDirect Technologies for this important webinar on the economic realities of SOA in the Insurance industry, revealing new patent-pending technologies that can dramatically lower the costs of mainframe SOA enablement.
Shadow Technical Demonstrations
| Introduction to DataDirect Shadow z/Services #1 Using web services to access mainframe data. |
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| Introduction to DataDirect Shadow z/Services #2 Using web services to access mainframe screen logic. |
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| Introduction to DataDirect Shadow z/Services #3 Using web services to access mainframe business logic. |
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| Introduction to DataDirect Shadow z/Events Managing mainframe business events in VSAM. |
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| Introduction to DataDirect Shadow z/Direct #1 Overview of direct SQL access to mainframe. |
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| Introduction to DataDirect Shadow z/Direct #2 Overview of direct SQL access to DB2. |
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Gartner: Data Consistency and SOA
Download this Gartner report: With industry leading technologies in SOA (Sonic ESB) and data services (DataXtend Semantic Integrator), Progress Software has the responsive integration technologies to ensure data consistency within SOA with reduced complexity and lower TCO.
Mainframe TCO
Lower your mainframe Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by diverting up to 99% of data and SOA integration workloads to the zIIP specialty engine. Read this white paper to learn more about reducing mainframe TCO.
A Flexible Approach to Mainframe Migration
When mainframe migration is a requirement, Progress® DataDirect® Shadow® can provide a flexible, industry-standard SOA solution, that is developer friendly and makes the best use of existing skills and resources.
Removing the Mainframe Price Barrier from Enterprise Integration
Mainframes play a critical role in a wide range of enterprises, but in order to extract the maximum value and benefit from these systems they must be integrated with other business-valued applications and systems. This white paper shows how next-generation mainframe middleware can leverage IBM's zIIP and zAAP specialty engines to redefine the economics of mainframe TCO within SOA.
Mainframe Modernization: When the Platform Is the Solution
Organizations that have a significant investment in IBM mainframes can undertake modernization efforts while remaining on this platform. IBM has made significant investment and innovation in the platform, and clients have a variety of choices to continue their modernization efforts.
Bloor In-Detail Report - DataDirect Shadow v7
By incorporating Shadow into their solutions, ISVs can expand their potential market by including initial or expanded access to mainframe assets as well as enhance their solution TCO by leveraging the most cost effective mainframe integration product on the market.
TDWI Checklist Report: Mainframe Modernization
Get practical recommendations to help you develop a comprehensive mainframe modernization strategy and forge robust connectivity with more modern computing platforms.
Mainframe TCO Research Report from the 451Group
In this report, industry analyst John Abbott from The 451 Group gives his take on version 7 of the DataDirect Shadow mainframe integration platform, which allows customers to take better advantage of IBM’s System z mainframe specialty engines (zIIP and zAAP).
zIIP Specialty Engine Exploitation
Lower Mainframe Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by diverting up to 99% of data and SOA integration workloads from the mainframe General Purpose Processor (GPP) to the zIIP specialty engine.
DataDirect Shadow - version 7.1.2 Web Services Performance Analysis
The performance analysis of DataDirect Shadow z/Services v7.1.2 (Shadow z/Services v7) was conducted at the DataDirect Technologies mainframe products development lab in Sugar Land, Texas.
Gartner Research Report: DataDirect Offering Suggests a Future for IBM Specialty Engines
Additional information on the benefits of mainframe specialty engines can be found in the recent Gartner, Inc. report, DataDirect Offering Suggests Future for IBM Specialty Engines by Dale Vecchio and Massimo Pezzini.
Getting the Most from System Z
In this whitepaper, learn how the mainframe can be modern and cost-efficient while still providing reliability with the System z specialty engines.
Mainframe SOA Research Report from The Clipper Group
In this report, Clipper Group analyst Anne MacFarland recommends using DataDirect Shadow v7 to make using IBM’s System z9 for SOA less expensive.
Nucleus ROI Case Study: DataDirect Shadow in Financial Services Firm
A global financial services firm deployed DataDirect Shadow and its mainframe Web services technology at the early stages of its service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption.
Reducing the Complexity of Mainframe Integration Through a Single Unified Platform
A single unified platform for mainframe integration translates into faster development and deployment of new, high value applications, streamlined business processes and real-time access to enterprise data and logic, regardless of where it resides within the enterprise.
ZapThink: The Mainframe as a First Class SOA Participant
In this whitepaper, ZapThink research analyst Jason Bloomberg explores the challenges customers face when attempting to integrate their legacy systems with new technologies and architectures, and the issues associated with traditional mainframe integration methods.
Mainframe Modernization with ADABAS
If your organization has business critical applications that need to integrate with mainframe-based Adabas data, then you should check out this brochure.
Mainframe Modernization with DB2
Progress DataDirect Shadow supports multiple, parallel integration methods and reduces the complexity of DB2 integration resulting in less maintenance, lower costs and fewer points of risk.
Mainframe Modernization with VSAM
Progress DataDirect Shadow is a comprehensive mainframe integration
solution that delivers a full range of mainframe modernization options for VSAM.
Progress DataDirect Shadow
Progress DataDirect Shadow is a single, standards-based integration architecture that offers a comprehensive tool set for enterprise developers who wish to extend core mainframe data and applications into more modern computing environments.
Progress DataDirect Shadow for ISVs
For independent software vendors, Progress DataDirect Shadow can help increase a product’s value by expanding its scope to leverage data residing on IBM System z mainframes and by lowering customer costs for accessing mainframe data with your product.
Progress DataDirect Shadow z/Direct
Progress DataDirect Shadow z/Direct enables direct SQL access to mainframe programs and data stored in an array of relational and non-relational formats.
Progress DataDirect Shadow z/Events
To facilitate mainframe Business Event Processing, Progress DataDirect Shadow z/Events provides robust Change Data Capture (CDC) for managing data (state changes) events that occur within mainframe databases.
Progress DataDirect Shadow z/Services
Progress DataDirect Shadow z/Services is an enterprise-class SOA enablement solution that allows core mainframe systems to serve as both providers and consumers of Web services functionality.
"74% of the Global 2000 are now using service-oriented architecture and most architects recognize that SOA is more than Web Services and better application integration."
