InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
July 20, 1998
Mainframe Data Online
continued...page 2 of 3Alaska's state government is using iXpress from Software AG Americas to ease the notoriously painful process of dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles. When vehicle information rested solely on the DMV mainframe, drivers would have to wait in line for hours to register their cars, often after lengthy trips from remote locations. After a $300,000, 4-1/2-month conversion, Alaskans can use their credit cards to register their cars or purchase vanity license plates through the DMV's Web site.
When a Web user makes a request of the mainframe registration Web page, that request is transmitted to a Windows NT machine running Microsoft Internet Information Server and iXpress, says Dennis Hoffman, the state's data processing manager. iXpress selects a Web page from the iXpress Web Library and dispatches an object to the DMV mainframe--an IBM R44 running the MVS/ESA operating system. Software AG's Entire Network runs on the NT server and the mainframe. The mainframe component, EntireX, uses its broker messaging product and the Component Object Model protocol to gather the relevant information from Software AG's Adabase database running on the mainframe. This data then passes through the various filters to the Web user.
Rapid Return
The payoff to the state has been almost immediate, says Alaska CIO Mark Boyer. The government's costs for registration plummeted, from $7.75 per car to 91 cents, Boyer says. A process that used to take four to six weeks now requires less than two minutes.
These results came from addressing the technical issues and managing the cultural considerations brought about by opening up sensitive mainframe data to the public. "The Software AG Americas people sat down and spent a week mentoring our legacy people in middleware and the Web," Boyer says. "It produced a newfound enthusiasm in our legacy custodians."
Some mainframe specialists remain skeptical of Web integration, analysts and vendors say, because nearly every corporate division relies on the central system for its day-to-day work--meaning a mainframe breakdown can spell companywide disaster. "There's been a lot of noise about not having to make changes on the mainframe program that's been running for five to 10 years," says Steve Levine, Oracle's senior director of Internet product marketing.
Even more troubling to IT managers than an accidental, internal foul-up is a deliberate, external attack. Opening up mainframe information to the inherently insecure Internet can cause sleepless nights. "Security is invariably the first conversation we have with customers," says Paul King, worldwide business manager at Hewlett-Packard Consulting. "They want to be sure that their assets, their systems of record, are safe from spoofing from the inside and hacking from the outside."
Not For Everyone
But third-party middleware isn't every user's answer to these concerns. "We're having a hard time betting the enterprise on an outside solution," says Todd Cinnamon, development manager at the Sabre Group in Fort Worth, Texas. "We've been fine-tuning the mainframe over the years. It's grown to have its own unique personality. By building our own system, it'll meet 100% of our requirements."
At a cost of $6 million to $8 million, Sabre assembled middleware in-house that brings the schedule, price, and passenger information sitting on the company's IBM S/390 mainframe to the Web server. Sabre then lets managers at its largest corporate customers make travel arrangements through their corporate intranets. More than 150,000 business travelers have used the system.
No matter where the middleware is built, some experts see it as an oversold solution to the puzzle of integrating mainframe data with the Web. "Middleware is unnecessarily complex, difficult, and expensive in most cases," says Brian Jeffries, managing director of International Technology Group. ITG recently completed a study that recommends mainframe-based Web servers in many instances.
"Mainframes already [host] core business-critical systems," the study says. "These could be simply and inexpensively Web-enabled." ITG says mainframe-based Web servers are at least 23% cheaper than Unix or Windows NT-based equivalents.
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Illustration by Boris Lyubner
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