What is the Challenge for Businesses Integrating Modern Technologies?
It is not easy to develop applications and bring them to market rapidly. As the world turns digital quickly, many businesses are looking to facilitate the integration of modern technologies with legacy data and legacy systems.
Today’s customers expect a full digital experience. Customers want a UX experience just like the ones they experience when buying on commercial websites. Businesses using IBM Z need to modernize their customer journeys to stay current with market and customer demands. This requires platform independence where non-IBM Z applications can be implemented with IBM Z applications.
Consider government organizations as an example, where numerous departments engage in manual operations. These organizations also face the challenge of adhering to regulations that may necessitate the creation of new applications or the improvement of existing ones. To address these needs, they must upgrade their IBM Z systems to align with the latest releases and functionalities to sustain their workloads.
IBM Z customers need to easily integrate IBM Z solutions with various external technologies. Modifications to the environmental information technology occur very rapidly and require continuous attention to IBM Z integration abilities.
How does Sapiens eMerge solve these challenges?
Sapiens eMerge technology is a rapid, declarative, rules-based business system development and deployment environment. An eMerge developer specifies WHAT and not HOW, thus eliminating procedural code. Using an English-like rule syntax, developers specify standard business logic only, and the rule-based engine automatically infers all the non-standard operations.
eMerge boasts a central, dynamic, rule-based repository that contains all application definitions. Any application element defined in the repository needs only be changed once for all its appearances in the application to be automatically updated.
Our technology includes an integrated GUI object modeling tool that accelerates business modeling and the rapid generation of all application definitions to be stored in the central repository and contains an enterprise-scale transaction engine – capable of running heavy duty transaction loads, supporting thousands of simultaneous users.
As an integrated multi-tier, multi-platform and cross-database environment, applications can be developed on one platform and deployed on another without changes. The data, logic and presentation layers of an application are completely separated. This separation provides scalability and flexibility to the developer.
eMerge also Includes a set of ready-made functions and object behavior attributes for the use of developers. These can be easily included at development time, using the comprehensive eMerge Development Workbench with its built-in business rules wizard.
An open platform supporting Java, COM/COM+ and XML interoperability with eMerge objects, including IBM’s WebSphere platform and other industry-standard technologies, eMerge fully integrates back-office legacy applications to the Web.
All the above factors combine to accelerate development by a conservative factor of 4:1 and reduce maintenance by at least 80%, in comparison to traditional software development environments.
The Synergy of eMerge and IBM
Dozens of eMerge-based solutions are currently operated on IBM mainframe platforms. As eMerge has evolved through the years, most of the solution’s investment was exposed to external technologies adjusted by eMerge versions+. Together with eMerge IBM Z customers, Sapiens continues to enhance the IBM Z platform capabilities focused in two directions:
IBM Z enhancements
Direct investment in the IBM Z operating system, as well as in the wide set of eMerge associated products of IBM: DB2, CICS, IMS, MQSeries, Cobol, PL/I, and WebSphere. These investments in Z and the products are to enable new functionalities that IBM provides.
IBM Z integration with other technologies
Customers using IBM Z should be able to seamlessly incorporate IBM Z solutions with a range of external technologies. Due to the swiftly evolving nature of environmental information technology, it is essential to consistently maintain and enhance IBM Z integration capabilities. Most integrations require the exposure of IBM Z eMerge applications either as a web-server or as a web-client. Due to IT trends, eMerge integration abilities are always under continuous development. Integration abilities between eMerge IBM Z applications and any non-IBM-Z applications, can be implemented by the following optional alternatives:
- Messaging and Queuing – This integration can be implemented in both inbound and outbound directions, synchronously and asynchronously. The queuing may be implemented via these state-of-the-art technologies:
- Either by SOAP or REST protocols
- Either by XML or JSON technologies
- Web-services exposing – Approach any eMerge application object access via standard web-services by JAVA or C# running from the IBM Z platform.
Sapiens is using both IBM Z and VM operating systems as the base development and maintenance platform for all eMerge available platforms. eMerge program code is developed and maintained on a mainframe as a single common source for IBM Z and non-IBM-Z platforms. Only after eMerge code testing on IBM Z is eMerge code distributed to other operating systems – IBM I Series, Linux, and Windows.
