NetManage Advocates 'Incremental SOA' and Launches Planner Tool

Published: November 14, 2006

by Alex Woodie

NetManage is close to launching a new product designed to shed light on how workers use OS/400 and mainframe applications so that IT organizations can better map out a course toward implementing a service orientated architecture (SOA) that will see actual use. What's more, the new tool, which was announced yesterday, goes a step farther and allows users to automatically generate Web services from the most commonly used fields and screens, part of NetManage's new "incremental SOA" vision.

One of the biggest hurdles to application modernization and implementing an SOA is just getting started. You might have your Web service-enabling software selected and your choice of SOA technologies made. But finding exactly where to start can be a challenge when faced with hundreds or thousands of legacy programs. This is the lesson learned by NetManage, the developer of RUMBA and a vendor that's been on the forefront of Web services and SOA-enablement for OS/400 and mainframe servers with its OnWeb suite of products.

"We were dealing with customers that didn't really know how to get started," says Archie Roboostoff, senior manager of product management. "It was more of a 'Let's white board the whole thing, grab all screens, and service enable everything and hope people use them.' But they didn't have proof they needed to be service enabled."

When the SOA Planner--a Java-based program that runs under Windows and attaches to a network switch--is running, it logs every 5250 and 3270 screen and every keystroke made by the users. When the data collection period is over, IT architects and managers can view summary data (either within the tool or via data exported to an OLAP tool or Excel) to see exactly who is using applications and how they're being used. The tool is non-invasive, and uses passive sniffing technology.

The SOA Planner not only logs every screen and keystroke, but it also correlates activity occurring across different systems (currently only System i and System z, although Unix, Linux, and Windows support is due to follow).

For example, say a call center customer service representative moves from its primary CICS system to an OS/400 system for a customer record, loads that record into the CICS system, and then looks up something else on the mainframe. These activities, while they occur on different systems, are all performed in the support of a single transaction, but a standard logging tool will not be able to connect the dots, the company says.

Once a team of developers has the "who, what, where, and how" of their application usage, they can create a much more targeted SOA that has a better chance of actually getting used and improving business processes, Roboosotoff says.

The best candidates for this tool are primarily the large OS/400 and mainframe shops with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of users, although midsize shops lacking a good grasp of what applications and screens their workers use would also benefit from the software. Since the tool takes snapshots of users' screens (kept in a compressed JPG format), NetManage recommends only monitoring a fraction of the workers, and then applying those results to the whole.

Incremental SOA

SOA Planner is a stand-alone tool, and the results it generates can be used to implement a more targeted SOA using any vendor's stack of SOA, Web services, and integration software. But the tool does have a special affinity for NetManage's OnWeb Server, which is available for CICS and for iSeries (it's an AIX product that runs on i5/OS via PASE).

There's an option in the SOA Planner tool to have it export a script to OnWeb that quickly service-enables certain activities, Roboostoff says. This service-enabling process can be activated by the users themselves, independent of developer input, which is part of NetManage's "Incremental SOA" plan, which was also unveiled yesterday. "Users have a hard time using services developed by developers," he says. "Developers want to control their own thing, and deal with own little universe."

Empowering users to have input into a more iterative SOA development process is what the SOA Planner is all about, Roboostoff says. "It can eliminate that cultural hurdle and blue print services based on actual uses, instead of white boarding and making assumptions based on things that are theoretical and not based in practice," he says. "It allows a phased, iterative approach."

The SOA Planner is the cornerstone of NetManage's incremental SOA strategy, which advocates a staged, low-risk process for achieving ROI on SOA, as opposed to the "big bang" approach, which inevitably seems to fail.

There are four steps to NetManage's plan, which can achieve ROI in 12 to 18 months, the company says. This first step of incremental SOA is planning, and this is where the SOA Planner can make an impact, the company says. The second stage is building a small, prototype SOA project, and ensuring users are buying into the new system. Step three is evolving that initial project through the use of shared Web services; overcoming developer resistance is a major part of this stage, NetManage says. The final stage is scaling the new SOA environment and making sure it doesn't negatively impact iSeries and mainframe performance.

Zvi Alon, chairman, founder, and CEO of NetManage, says the four-step process was developed in response to customer needs. "Our customers in the financial, healthcare, and insurance industries have demanded a way to incrementally SOA-enable their IT infrastructure in order to reduce costs while leveraging essential information stored on the host computers and mainframes systems," he says.

NetManage is finishing up beta testing of the SOA Planner Tool and expects it to be generally available very soon, if it's not available already. Flat rate pricing is $150,000. Alternatively, organizations can buy a monthly subscription to the tool, which starts at $25,000 for 25 users. For more information, visit www.netmanage.com.