IBM Simplifies Enterprise Software Development

Applications can be built once and deployed across disparate computing platforms

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Feb 11, 2011, 12:00 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new software that is redefining the way enterprise customers manage the design and delivery of applications across disparate computing landscapes. The new software helps organizations reduce IT and administration overhead through a single, integrated development platform to help enterprises unify both new and legacy systems.

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Software development teams continue to be challenged by escalating IT administration costs, security access control issues, and working with multiple systems in the data center. According to a recent IBM study, the single application development environment can yield up to a 20 percent gain in productivity while protecting legacy investments and progressively managing and integrating new system advancements.

With today's news, IBM is delivering a single, integrated software development platform to help enterprises unify their multi-system environments. IBM can now help software development teams design, develop, test, deploy and manage software for the IBM zEnterprise System, across multiple operating systems and languages in a single, consolidated effort.

With new software support for the IBM zEnterprise System, IBM clients in financial services, government, telecommunications and any industry operating core business processes on a mainframe, can experience a truly integrated hardware and software delivery platform. This platform can now span the entire enterprise, supporting zEnterprise mainframe and select IBM Power7 and workload optimized systems, as well as the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer, yielding a tightly configured, integrated data center environment. Later this year, IBM will deliver support for select System x servers. Applications created in Java, for example, can be deployed in an AIX environment without changing code or server specifications. Organizations no longer have to maintain duplicate environments for application development across various platforms, and now have the flexibility to move workloads around without having to worry about moving development teams and infrastructure.

Enterprise Application Lifecycle Management

A company needs to focus on the flow of people, process and artifacts across the development disciplines. It's entirely possible to have analysts who expertly manage requirements, developers who develop excellent code, and testers who find defects, and still fail at the project overall if these activities are disconnected from each other, or disconnected from the business.

The new IBM solutions include the Rational Developer for System z Family and the Rational Asset Analyzer Family. These software development offerings bring higher productivity through modern integrated development and test environments for mainframe development and zEnterprise support. Additionally, the new Rational Business Developer simplifies innovation by enabling application development on multiple mainframe platforms with EGL, an open business application development language. New capabilities for Rational Team Concert help bring together development organizations by providing a common solution for planning, reporting, change and configuration management.

The new IBM solutions for zEnterprise will help enterprise clients:

Increase organizational agility – Teams now have a single end-to-end view of an application project, with improved knowledge and understanding of how the mainframe and Power Systems technology-based applications interact, as well as awareness of what other developers are doing that could affect them – all in real time.

Reduce development complexity and cost – Using a common multi platform development and test environment, regardless of computing platform, means all of the developers have the same view of the application code, from either the front-end Web interface or the back-end transaction-processing or database interface.

Minimize project risk – Improved teamwork, automated deployment capabilities and system-generated management reports make development more efficient.

Trustmark National Bank Moves to Online Banking

Trustmark National Bank, based in Jackson, Mississippi, is a subsidiary of Trustmark Corporation, a diversified financial services company with $9.2 billion in assets. Trustmark needed to give their customers real-time access to their accounts through the web. However, rewriting program code would make the project riskier, slower and more costly. Trustmark turned to IBM Rational Developer for System z to extend its key banking applications to a browser-based environment with no rewriting of code or program logic. Leveraging its original investment in reliable, business-tested applications, the company avoided the expense, time and risk of recoding while helping staff work faster and smarter.

"Now our customers can access up-to-the minute account information and handle most all of their banking needs through our on-line banking system," said Paul Williams, Director of IT, Trustmark National Bank, "Using Rational Developer for System z and the IBM CICS Transaction Server Service Flow feature was a great time savings."

The project also delivered efficient self-service for the bank's customers, allowing them the ease and convenience of banking online, and allowed Trustmark to retain its investment in reliable, business-tested, existing applications.

Additionally, IBM business partners have developed solutions supporting Rational Team Concert to bring added value to clients for complex systems test integration, automated code review, database release management and connections for heterogeneous tool environments, for example. Several IBM Business Partners have announced integrated solutions for Rational Team Concert, continuing the expansion of the Jazz platform.

For more information: www.ibm.com/software