Profound Eliminates OLTP Requirement with Web Enablement Software

May 20, 2008 Alex Woodie

Users of the i OS-based Power Systems server (formerly System i) can now transform their green-screen applications to a new Web 2.0-style interface and ditch the OLTP, or interactive, processing requirement along the way by using the latest release of Profound Logic‘s Genie. Last week, the company announced that Genie has been switched from requiring OLTP resources on the i server to batch processing, potentially saving organizations money.

Genie is one of a new class of non-invasive tools for modernizing i5/OS screens on the fly, as users access them. The product, which was first released a year ago, uses AJAX techniques to automatically convert 5250 green-screen interfaces (including system screens and CL programs) into HTML-based graphical interfaces, based on the particular “skin” the user chooses.

Profound overhauled Genie with the launch of version 3.0 in February. That release brought the new capability for users to customize their HTML interfaces using drag-and-drop directly from a Web browser, eliminating the requirement to use Profound’s RPGsp programming tool whenever a change is required.

At some point, a bunch of Genie users came to a similar conclusion: They liked what Genie could do to Web-enable their legacy apps, but wouldn’t it be better if they ran under batch instead of interactive CPW?

“Several customers indicated to us that eliminating interactive processing is an important part of their modernization strategy,” says Alex Roytman, president and CEO of Profound Logic. “From this, we decided to build a new feature to eliminate 5250 OLTP.”

That feature debuted last week as Genie Accelerator, which is part of Genie version 3.0. Simply put, with Genie Accelerator installed, any application that has been Web-enabled using Genie will run under the System i’s batch subsystem instead of the interactive subsystem, according to Profound.

Considering that IBM has not fully eliminated the so-called “interactive tax” for running interactive, or OLTP, workloads with its System i servers (now called Power Systems servers), Profound’s move should save Genie customers substantial sums of money when configuring a server for maximum performance.

Genie Accelerator only works with the latest releases of the operating system–i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1, although Genie can run systems going back as far as OS/400 V5R2. Pricing is $150 per user. For more information, visit www.profoundlogic.com.