SHARE 2009 Next Week and Real-Time Change and Event Data Capture on the Mainframe

August 19, 2009 Data Platform

I’m excited to attend the  SHARE Conference next week and to deliver my presentation, “The Next Wave of SOA: Real-Time Events and CICS TS v. 4.1” (session #0902) at 11:00 on Monday, August 24.  The presentation will explore how CICS TS v. 4.1 can be combined with an event-enabled middleware (DataDirect Shadow anyone?) to create an enriched business event, transportable through a variety of protocols to provide data from the mainframe to BI, BAM or CEP applications.

With an estimated  90% of the Fortune 500 and large government organization using CICS running  on z/OS for their core business functions, the ability to non-invasively detect and emit business events from CICS  will undoubtedly increase the interest in events and Complex Event Processing generated by databases and applications on the mainframe.  Organizations looking to create a more agile and responsive infrastructure require the ability to connect to live events from wherever they originate – including CICS and mainframe database.

DataDirect Shadow z/Events offers a complete facility for the real-time capture and publication of events that occur within mainframe databases including DB2, VSAM, IMS/DB, CA-IDMS or Adabas.  Once captured, the event is transformed into XML to facilitate utilization with a broad range of distributed application environments and databases. The ability of CICS TS v. 4.1 to capture transactional behaviors as events coupled with DataDirect Shadow’s change data capture on the mainframe offers unprecedented visibility and extended support for business intelligence, CEP and event-driven architectures. Once more, with DataDirect Shadow’s patent-pending technology that exploits the zIIP specialty engine, almost all event processing done by Shadow z/Events can be diverted from the mainframe General Purpose Processor (GPP) to the specialty engine – reducing MSU utilization and mainframe Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO).  This capability was developed in close partnership with IBM System z and therefore does not cause IBM or any other third-party code to become zIIP-enabled.

DataDirect Shadow’s inclusion among the family of Progress Software products designed for operational responsiveness provides an end-to-end solution for CEP on the mainframe.  It joins the Sonic ESB and Apama, named by Forrester Research as a standout leader in the CEP platform market.  More to come on this relationship in future blog posts.

You will also be able to find me and the Progress DataDirect team at booth 502.  I hope to see you there!

Gregg Willhoit