Furthermore, in the majority of cases they are organizations that currently maintain a sizable investment in mainframe computing.

In today’s world of modern computing, interestingly enough, there are more transactions processed by IBM CICS and IMS than by the Internet in its entirety. Enterprise organizations leverage CICS and IMS to process more than 80 billion transactions or $3.5 trillion worth of business every day. For decades, the mainframe provided dependability without fail, and when distributed computing became a practical reality, many of these IT departments held back for a moment before jumping in head-first.

As a result, vendors that are late adopters of components have the luxury of choosing between already-matured, component-based technologies or more service-centric paradigms that have in the past year made the transition from questionable hype to proven application development tools. In some cases, these mainframe organizations are wholeheartedly adopting the service-oriented architecture.

What this means is that these organizations are devoting their "service-dedicated" budget to quickly exposing mainframe functionality as ready-to-use enterprise Web services. By doing so, IT departments are effortlessly reusing proven mainframe functionality to build a new generation of "legacy" applications.

Demonstrated Success
The results have been quite favorable in many circumstances, as most organizations have saved countless hours and costs in the development process – and most important, answered business needs almost immediately. To further illustrate this scenario, let’s look at an organization that has experienced true success with repurposing mainframe logic within the service-oriented realm.

With an annual budget of more than $3 billion, Miami-Dade County, Florida serves over 2.2 million residents, which is larger than the populations of 16 states. As one might expect, such a large population demands that local government maintain a high level of operational efficiency, and in effect, ensure quality services to the average citizen.

For a number of years, the county employed an effective legacy extension strategy - refacing mainframe applications with more modern graphical user interfaces. However, despite the savings Miami-Dade realized as a result of Web-to-host and wireless-to-host initiatives, the county understood that by streamlining IT even further through standardization, there was even more potential for cost savings.

In an effort to standardize the manner in which core county systems integrated with one another, and potentially with disparate systems run by state and federal governments, as well as to provide citizens and county employees with Internet access to even more government services, Miami-Dade licensed ClientSoft ServiceBuilder to incorporate mainframe functionality into a more modern service-oriented architecture.

Miami-Dade first employed ServiceBuilder to build several new citizen-facing applications from mainframe logic. To maximize potential reuse down the road, Miami-Dade utilized ServiceBuilder to generate each of the functions within these applications as callable Web services. This approach not only allowed county developers to quickly expose mainframe logic as deployable Web services, but more importantly, once the developers created the Web services, they could easily reuse those Web services in subsequent projects. Regarding IT costs, this pattern of efficient reuse immediately and substantially improves the bottom line.

The county then moved forward with more ambitious projects. Miami-Dade’s Property Tax Appraisal System contains information vital to virtually every aspect of county government. By leveraging ServiceBuilder to wrap this mainframe logic into an easily deployed Web service, the county is standardizing access to this mission-critical functionality for over 40 county departments. The beauty of this initiative resides in the fact that not one of these departments needs to maintain the Web service. The IT department simply maintains the mainframe as always and then re-generates the Web service when it is time for an update.

The county has streamlined operational efficiency, enhanced communication between departments and disparate agencies, and, most importantly, significantly enhanced service offerings to the taxpayer. But at the same time, to combat the concern highlighted by Gartner that a reduction in spending has to mean a reduction in Web services development, Miami-Dade County also accomplished rapid reuse of proven functionality and dramatically reduced application development and maintenance costs.

It is no stretch to say that the mainframe and the service-oriented world can seamlessly coexist. Moreover, as long as organizations continue to reduce costs while enhancing service to customers, partners, or taxpayers, these trends toward IT budgeting and Web services spending will undoubtedly continue.