IT Uses Web Services to Preserve Data

Computerworld - Corporate IT operations are quickly ramping up Web services projects to preserve existing investments in mainframes and other legacy systems by unlocking their data for use in new Web-based applications.

For example, the 17th Judicial Court of Florida is building a real-time case management system based on Web services that's expected to be in production this fall.

The new system will use Shadow z/Events event management tools from Neon Systems Inc. along with the Web services.

The Neon tools will reside on the clerk of the court's VSAM mainframe and juvenile and court administration databases to "listen" for new data updates, said Les Pearson, systems and programming manager with the Judicial Information Systems department at the Fort Lauderdale-based court.

These changes will be reflected in a real-time data warehouse that can be accessed by 400 to 500 case managers and other judicial personnel, Pearson said.

American Automobile Association Carolinas, meanwhile, is already planning to significantly expand the use of its 4-month-old paperless processing system that incorporates Web services to expose AS/400-based insurance policy and claims data to a new Web-based application.

Harry Johns, manager of insurance information technology at the Charlotte, N.C.-based company, said that over the next six to eight months the system will be expanded to support thousands of workers compared with the hundreds who use it now.

That system was implemented in April, and AAA Carolinas estimates that since then it has saved $20,000 that it would have spent to store paper records.

Using IBM WebSphere integration middleware and a document imaging and management Web application from RJS Software Systems Inc., AAA Carolinas has built a system that eliminates all paper-based processing, Johns said.

As a result, the company has slashed claims processing and new policy sign-up times from weeks to hours and has seen a 60% spike in its customer acquisition and retention from the $100,000 project, Johns added. "We're trying to take advantage of as much of the benefits the AS/400 has to offer as we can," he said. The new system "reduces the costs because we can reuse the services for multiple things."

Vendors, meanwhile, are updating their tools to help enterprises integrate mainframe data with service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Sugar Land, Texas-based Neon Systems last week rolled out a new mainframe enterprise service bus designed to work as an "on ramp" for mainframe integration using Web services.

AttachmateWRQ began shipping Web integration software last month from Kapow Technologies with its own Verastream host integration software.

Vestmark Inc., which provides a hosted platform for financial service asset managers and banks to reconcile and update client accounts, is using technology from AttachmateWRQ and Kapow to access data and business logic from mainframes and other back-end systems, said John Lunny, vice president and chief operating officer of Wakefield, Mass.-based Vestmark.