Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC White Paper Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation Business and IT executives should not have to choose between their desire to innovate for future growth and the desire to avoid disrupting current operations. Enterprise innovation that embraces and extends existing infrastructure and applications is possible through modern software architectures such as web services and SOA as long as those investments perform competitively when measured against alternative platforms and they are able to be modernized to participate in these architectures. CA has a strong history of both honing CA IDMS competitive performance and availability advantages and modernizing CA IDMS to keep current with advances in software architectures and development practices. This paper discusses how CA s continuous investments have enhanced and modernized CA IDMS; how enterprises can leverage CA IDMS performance and availability advantages in innovative software projects; and the benefits of innovative reuse of existing CA IDMS environments.
Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation Page 1 Enterprise Innovation Can Embrace Existing Infrastructure The application of technology to achieve business goals has long been at the center of increasing competitiveness and improving business operations. Recent advances in software architectures, rapid development techniques, and hardware infrastructure provide enormous opportunities for future business innovation, even as enterprises depend on their proven technological investments, such as CA IDMS to automate core business functions that deliver today s revenue streams. This dichotomy often creates tension between innovating for future growth and sustaining current operations. On the one hand, there is the desire to enter new markets or change the competitive landscape with new services. Business intelligence analysis and reporting, providing back-office support for new online services, automating business to business transactions, and eliminating information gaps between government agencies are just a few opportunities for business innovation to stimulate future revenue. On the other hand, the operational value of the CA IDMS environment is clear (for example, financial and manufacturing enterprises typically process billions of dollars worth of transactions through CA IDMS), whereas the costs and risks of platform migration can be astronomically high. This is particularly true as the size and complexity of the database and application environment increases. Proposals of three million dollars to convert a single CA IDMS application and estimates of twenty to fifty million dollars and higher to convert a portfolio of CA IDMS applications are not unusual. Additionally, even the most thorough cost analyses have difficultly estimating the risks associated with application functionality that cannot be accurately duplicated or underperformance of the new database structure. These risks and costs increase the imperative to maintain and extend the current operating infrastructure. Rather than allowing this tension to create untenable choices for business and IT executives, Ptak, Noel & Associates (PNA) advocates enterprise innovation that embraces and extends existing infrastructure and application assets. When enterprise innovation is done in a vacuum, the nearterm results are usually not as effective as applying a combination of new technology and existing infrastructure. Consider Apple s iphone that delivers slick new capabilities in a new form factor, but has achieved rapid adoption because it also leverages familiar applications and runs over an existing network. In the case of CA IDMS, corporate data and applications are key assets that can be combined with new technologies and business models to deliver competitive advantage. When innovation is combined with existing infrastructure, business and IT, executives no longer are forced to choose between developing new opportunities and disrupting business operations. In the case of CA IDMS, there are three factors that make this combination possible. First, modern application architectures (such as J2EE,.Net, SOA, and Web Services) enable legacy systems to be reusable assets. While much of the current excitement about these
Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation Page 2 architectures revolves around creating new applications, it is important to remember that these architectures also dramatically simplify creative reuse of existing technology. These architectures provide a cleaner separation of software component implementation, workflow connecting the components, and middleware providing the physical integration than in many older architectures or marketectures. This separation dramatically simplifies innovation because code conversions, data migrations, and technology replacements are not required to combine existing data and applications with new business applications and processes. In other words, innovation is no longer at odds with maintaining existing technology investments, as long as those investments perform competitively against alternative platforms and they are modernized to participate in these architectures. The onus is on the technology supplier, in this case CA, to deliver superior database responsiveness to new workloads generated by the new projects and to simplify database access so that from an application development standpoint, there is no distinction between relational and non-relational databases. The other factors that allow enterprises to innovate while embracing and extending their CA IDMS environments are CA s continued investment in maintaining CA IDMS competitive advantages and CA s continuous modernization strategy for CA IDMS. The majority of CA s research and development investment in CA IDMS over the last 20 years has been directed at these issues. CA customers have been reaping the benefits. We have one system with 400 million records, said Bruce Hillyer, manager of database administration for the United States Department of Homeland Security s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. No [new] relational database can handle the volume or the search capabilities required to manage such a large number of records. 1 Spencer Briggs, Director of Justice Technology Services for South Australia s State Justice System, notes, Another major strength of the solution is its ability to allow growth and flexibility in the development of the Justice Information System. CA IDMS lets us incorporate additional data with minimal impact on existing applications, which makes it an evolutionary system. It can flex, shift, and expand, so that while organizational structures come and go, our criminal justice system continues on. As we progressively adopt Web Services, CA IDMS will remain a key data repository. 2 Let us examine CA s investment in CA IDMS more closely. CA Investment Hones CA IDMS Competitive Edge CA s continued investment in mainframe technologies, such as CA IDMS, is driven not only from long-term commitment from CA s executive management, but also from a solid business model. CA IDMS is licensed and relied on by more than a thousand enterprises across industries and 1 DHS mainframe data enters Web world Government Computing News Nov 2007 http://www.gcn.com 2 Ensuring Justice Remains Available and Accessible 24 Hours a Day CA Customer Success Story, Dec 2007
Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation Page 3 geographies, as well as many government agencies at federal, state, and local levels around the world. When asked about CA s commitment to the platform, one customer from a state government agency responded, I don t even think about it. CA IDMS environments are too large and too important to core operations for it to make any business sense for CA to abandon those customers. To support these customers, CA s mainframe business unit is structured to focus on the unique requirements of the mainframe market including CA IDMS with significant investments in several areas. One area of investment is enhancing CA IDMS underlying engine to keep pace with IBM s advances in System z hardware and software. For example, CA IDMS exploits the high availability and scalability capabilities of Parallel Sysplex to run without unscheduled disruptions, even as it scales to support enormous transaction volumes. CA s exploitation of symmetric multiprocessors, 64-bit memory, and enterprise DASD features, such as Parallel Access Volume, further enhance throughput scalability. CA IDMS also features an Express Reorg utility that improves system availability by reducing scheduled downtime. Customers, such as BT, a worldwide communications solutions leader, rely on CA IDMS availability enhancements to process more than 240 million transactions needed to manage over 20 million business and customer accounts every day. 3 Another aspect of CA s continuous investment is visible in how CA IDMS technology strategy supports CA s strategic vision of Enterprise IT Management (EITM). The EITM vision is a processoriented approach for delivering solutions to govern, manage, and secure the entire enterprise technology spectrum. With this approach, CA s customers can meet business needs with holistic IT solutions. For example, enterprises require an end-to-end audit trail of external user identities that update critical financial data to comply with regulatory requirements. However, Web-based financial transactions traverse a wide range of distributed and mainframe technologies and a variety of identity and access management systems. To provide a holistic solution, CA IDMS was enhanced with CA SiteMinder Web Access Manager integration to support auditing of database updates initiated from Web and distributed applications. 4 Ptak, Noel & Associates expects CA to continue these efforts with similar integration initiatives to address other end-to-end management issues, such as managing application performance and service quality. 5 New staff and other investments, such as the opening of the Mainframe Center of Excellence, take advantage of global trends in sourcing specific technical expertise. Enterprises are increasingly turning to centers of excellence to recruit highly skilled technical staff. CA has also invested resources in customer partnership programs, such as the Development Buddy program, that provide customers access to pre-beta code allowing direct feedback about prospective new 3 NEW RELEASES OF CA MAINFRAME DATABASE SOLUTIONS OPTIMIZE AVAILABILITY AND PERFORMANCE CA Inc. July 10, 2006 4 CA SiteMinder Web Access Manager is also a key integration point for CA s distributed and mainframe security products (such as CA Top Secret and CA ACF2 ). It provides a centralized management foundation to secure Web applications and data. 5 Managing Service Quality: CA delivers business value by automating integration of ITIL disciplines Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC, May 2007
Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation Page 4 features. One customer from a state government agency noted that dedicating technical resources to such programs is a good indicator of a vendor s commitment to supporting that customer base. CA IDMS Modernization Open for Innovation CA has a strong history of introducing new features and capabilities that allow CA IDMS to participate in major technology and business trends. CA IDMS data and applications have been continually opened to interact with innovative technologies adopted by enterprise customers. Figure 1 represents only a small subset of CA IDMS capabilities delivered to help enterprises meet new challenges and exploit newly available technologies. Additional CA IDMS support for web and SOA applications are just one step in allowing enterprises to cost effectively leverage existing assets in innovative situations. As one database administrator put it: SQL is here to stay, so anyone with a non-relational database should, at minimum, provide an interface to allow SQL applications to access their data. CA has done a good job of that since the early nineties; we just need to get better at letting our SQL programmers know about it, so they can exploit it. Figure 1: Timeline of CA IDMS support for major computing trends Modernization of corporate technology is also inherently less expensive and has a lower risk profile than migration projects. With modernization, the existing environment remains essentially intact and enterprises are provided features and capabilities that allow developers to leverage existing data and business logic in innovative ways.
Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation Page 5 Options for Leveraging CA IDMS in Web and SOA Applications The beauty of tiered web applications and service oriented architectures is that they enable developers to use standard tools and techniques to leverage different kinds of data and business logic, regardless of the hardware platform. This is a good match for CA IDMS customers, because CA has provided three ways to enable CA IDMS assets to participate in innovative web applications and service oriented architectures. 1) Direct database access. This option is best for developing new business logic as web services and applications which must access CA IDMS as they would any other relational database. Developers use familiar development platforms and modern languages to leverage CA IDMS information in new services through SQL statements and dynamic SQL protocols, such as JDBC and ODBC. CA s modernization technology makes this direct access possible by mapping CA IDMS network objects (such as records, elements, and sets) to corresponding relational tables, columns, and referential constraints. Table procedures enable full SQL access to all network objects. This simplifies integration with other enterprise business intelligence and data warehousing solutions. Other techniques, such as use of embedded foreign keys coupled with the primary and foreign key metadata support introduced in CA IDMS Server r16.1, provide additional alternatives to make existing CA IDMS data more relational for a much smaller effort than a database migration. One organization made the decision to migrate from CA IDMS a few years ago. To date, they have completed approximately one fifth of the migration project. They implemented CA IDMS direct database access option as a quick-fix for a specific application that required access to data not yet migrated. The SQL option proved to be so powerful that their SQL programmers no longer distinguish between the platforms. As the CA IDMS manager put it, We are beginning to realize that we do not need to complete the migration. As long as someone can teach a few DBAs how to apply their existing skills to managing CA IDMS, it can support all of our online projects and we can use those migration dollars and resources elsewhere. 2) Invoke CA IDMS applications as SQL procedures. This approach is best for leveraging CA IDMS unique high-performance navigational constructs in new applications or services with little additional effort. For example, one customer attempting to convert CA IDMS Bill of Materials (BOM) applications to relational database technology documented 200% to 500% more MIPS utilization on the same hardware platform after conversion. One of the contributing factors to this overhead was inefficient attempts to replicate navigation and processing of the BOM parts hierarchy. CA IDMS set construct enables access to all BOM records with a small number of instructions in a highly streamlined and efficient manner. Emulating this capability with relational databases requires temporary tables for each level in the BOM hierarchy, which require more runtime resources for processing. CA s modernization efforts allow customers to leverage CA IDMS high-performance navigation in new applications using familiar SQL procedure invocations. SQL procedures also enable reuse of the existing CA ADS, CA IDMS/DC COBOL, and CA IDMS/DC PL/1 business logic in place already.
Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation Page 6 This is particularly useful for robust applications that perform well and require little maintenance, yet must expand into web-based user interfaces. 3) Invoke CA IDMS applications as a web service. Enterprises can expose CA IDMS business logic as web services using the CA IDMS TCP/IP facility and standard XML for messaging. This option allows customers to quickly connect to data and applications from different platforms. Customers can also leverage existing CA IDMS screen-based applications by using the presentation interface as the basis of a Web service. This approach is useful in situations where the functionality of an existing 3270 screen must be exactly duplicated within an application or automated business process. Rather than recreate the business logic as a J2EE or.net component, developers can leverage existing scripts or create new ones, to navigate menus and dialogs, interact with the screen buffer, and expose the business logic as a web service. In both cases, the new web services can be readily reused in any number of new applications or automated processes. Since most enterprise application initiatives are implemented on a project by project basis, developers typically focus on creating a particular web application or leveraging a subset of their network database. In many cases, this project-based implementation can be facilitated by modernizing CA IDMS incrementally as these techniques are interchangeable and compatible with each other, allowing developers to match them to specific project needs. Benefits of Leveraging CA IDMS Faster time to innovation is a major benefit of leveraging CA IDMS. Enterprises are most agile when they can draw on their core operational strengths to target new opportunities. CA s modernization efforts allow enterprise developers to leverage existing CA IDMS data and application assets in new ways without significant recoding or depending on automated code conversion. Indeed, one database administrator noted a significant increase in the rate at which SQL programmers were adding new application queries running against existing CA IDMS data. While this additional activity made transaction volumes more variable, he noted that CA IDMS continues to perform at high levels. That increase in new application queries is also an indicator of another significant benefit the ability to take advantage of current, modern developer skill sets in modern languages and popular development environments (SQL, SOA, Java,.NET, etc.). Cost containment provides considerable additional benefits. CA IDMS modernization costs are typically significantly lower than migration projects, both in terms of cost to implement and in terms of disruption to the business. Another cost consideration is the number of staff required to support the database. One CA client noted a higher number of people involved in supporting their relational database systems than those supporting their CA IDMS environment. This is true even though relational database systems currently house only a small fraction of the data stored in the CA IDMS environment.
Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation Page 7 Enterprises also avoid a significant amount of risk and cost by preserving high performance databases and applications that have run reliably on the mainframe for years without any unscheduled disruptions. This is particularly important in situations where functionality and processing performance are not easily duplicated in relational databases. With so many organizations getting charged by MIPS usage and other measures, processing performance becomes a key factor in controlling fixed operational costs for the business. For example, the company that documented a 200% MIPS utilization increase for a particular BOM application during their migration attempt would see a significant, and probably permanent, increase in its annual processing costs. These risks and costs are typically higher with larger and more complex CA IDMS environments, which in turn increases the financial benefit gained by enterprise innovation that embraces and extends the currently operating, high performance infrastructure. Final Word Modernizing enterprise CA IDMS environments into reusable assets can deliver business innovation quickly and cost effectively. For this reason, IT and business executives are no longer faced with the challenge of choosing between innovating for competitive advantage and avoiding migration costs and risks. Web and SOA application architectures facilitate reuse and encourage business innovation that embraces existing technology with current performance and availability advantages. CA IDMS reuse also improves IT s cost effectiveness, as migration and replacement costs are avoided. Thus, both top and bottom line requirements can be simultaneously satisfied. CA IDMS easily participates in these application architectures. CA s continuous modernization efforts provide several interchangeable and compatible techniques for incorporating CA IDMS data and logic into existing application development projects. Business developers can use modern tools to leverage CA IDMS according to the specific needs of their projects. Innovation is not delayed by migration and replacement projects, instead it is enhanced by cost effective modernization. CA IDMS modernization is also supported by CA s commitment to continuing CA IDMS technological advantages, particularly with respect to transactional performance and high availability. Higher performance means that extensive application reuse will not dramatically increase CPU utilization and will help keep infrastructure costs in check. In the end, the strongest argument for modernization comes directly from CA s customers. Those that have embraced CA IDMS and the scalability, performance, and power efficiency benefits of the System z platform as strategic sources of competitive value have reaped significant benefits in terms of cost avoidance and business agility. As Del Bartlett, Database Manager, State of New Hampshire DMV, CA IDMS noted, CA s SQL implementation has reached such a high point in terms of ease of use and performance that I believe it gives CA IDMS unprecedented new life. As CA IDMS managers, we are now in an excellent position to support many new business applications with access to existing data.
Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC White Paper This paper was sponsored by: CA, Inc. One CA Plaza Islandia, NY 11749 1 800 225-5224 www.ca.com No part of this document can be used in any medium without the written permission of Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. While every care has been taken during the preparation of this document to ensure accurate information, the publishers cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions. PNA makes no assumptions as to the potential return on investment that other organizations will receive. PNA opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. About Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC With a belief that business success and IT success are inseparable, Ptak, Noel & Associates works with clients to identify, understand and respond to the implications of today s trends and innovations on the future of IT Operations. www.ptaknoelassociates.com March 2008