SOA Software has extended its Lifecycle Manager product to support API management on the mainframe. The vendor points out that APIs are converging with SOA from a governance perspective, and this new support is intended to provide customers with a unified platform to manage both APIs as well as existing SOA assets.
Applying Development Governance to Mainframe Assets
“If you are ignoring the mainframe you are ignoring a big part of many large enterprises’ IT environment,” said Brent Carlson, senior VP of SOA Software. “The reality is the mainframe applications are still in heavy use and will continue to be in heavy use. What we have done with the latest release of Lifecycle Manager is integrate the ability to control and govern mainframe-based service and API development right alongside what we have had in place for many years with the distributed- or Java- or .NET-based development activities."
Applying development governance to mainframe assets helps enterprises overcome the significant architectural challenges inherent in bringing legacy systems into the API Economy, where mobile apps need rapid, agile access to back-end systems, the vendor said. Lifecycle Manager is engineered to serve as the system of record for all enterprise assets, including mainframe-based SOAP services and RESTful APIs that expose legacy software functionality. Architects and developers will now be able to map dependencies between APIs and mainframe assets at the development stage and manage those APIs across their full lifecycles.
Bringing Mainframe Assets into the Service and API World
“We work mostly with Fortune 500 companies. These are the companies that have mainframe environments - and we are seeing an increasing interest from those types of customer is bringing the mainframe capabilities into the service and API world,” said Carlson.
This interest may be stemming from a recognition that the mainframe has been insufficiently integrated in the past, as well as a result of the general focus on API and partner integration through APIs, Carlson said. “From that standpoint, we see this as a very positive development and a maturation in the way APIs are being treated because they are not being used in a one-off fashion by a business unit to build something quick and see what it can get done, but rather APIs are being treated as part of an overall IT strategy with the mainframe being a key part of the approach."
Such a requirement "falls right into our sweet spot,” Carlson continued. “We have the most complete end-to-end governance and management suite in the industry across both SOAP-based services an REST-based APIs.”
For more information on Lifecycle Manager, click here.