At the SHARE conference last week, Progress DataDirect, the data infrastructure division of Progress Software Corporation and provider of data access and integration technologies, announced support for event processing capabilities available in the IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS) Transaction Server (TS) version 4.1.
With the launch of CICS TS v4.1, IBM included new event technologies that enable CICS to be configured to feed business event processing engines and business dashboards without the need for application change. CICS event processing is focused on application events of significance to the business, rather than systems management or IT events.
"IBM identified the fact that event-driven architectures could benefit greatly from applications within CICS being able to emit events," Jeff Overton, product marketing manager for DataDirect Shadow, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "They have taken this approach that offers a non-invasive way for these applications to emit these events, so that is a critical first step in being able to realize the full value of the business information within those applications."
The second step is being able to "get that information out of CICS and be able to then analyze that and perhaps part of that analysis is to combine it with other information from mainframe data sources," Overton continues. "Many of the applications on the mainframe could be using data sources outside of CICS as well. It is important to have the capability to not only capture events out of CICS, but to also capture other events on the mainframe such as updates to ADABAS or DB2 or VSAM or IDMS. And that's where Progress DataDirect Shadow comes into play."
Progress Software, through its Progress Apama event processing and Progress DataDirect Shadow products, provides solutions to complement and extend CICS TS v4.1 events. Apama event processing monitors rapidly moving event streams, detecting and analyzing important patterns and acts in sub-millisecond time. With Apama event processing, CICS business events now can be correlated and analyzed in real-time, to improve decision-making.
The DataDirect Shadow platform is a single, foundational architecture that supports requirements for integrating mainframe data, business logic and screens with SOAs and data-centric applications. Within Shadow is a facility for the real-time capture and publication of events that occur within mainframe databases including DB2 for z/OS, VSAM, IMS/DB, CA-IDMS or Adabas. Shadow complements the CICS TS v4.1 out-of-the-box event capabilities with the ability to persist and deliver CICS events over MQ or HTTP/HTTPS; and to augment CICS generated events with database events that collectively provide rich and contextual information that can be further analyzed by Apama event processing. Shadow also provides capabilities to filter, aggregate and enrich events to increase the context and business meaning of the technical database change.
The DataDirect Shadow platform's technology for reducing mainframe integration costs enables processing related to events to be diverted from the mainframe General Purpose Processor to the zIIP specialty engine, a capability that was developed in close partnership with the IBM System z group. For more information, go here.