Solutions for Real-Time Events

As part of an ambitious initiative to better manage its ever-growing case load, the State of Florida’s 17th Judicial Circuit is using Shadow z/Events to implement a real-time judicial information system. The court has used Shadow to greatly improve its reporting capabilities. Now it’s in the process of making it possible for judges reviewing a case before them, or patrol officers running information on a driver or vehicle, to access information that may have changed within the past few hours.

The court’s new real-time judicial information system brings together advanced elements of service-oriented architecture (SOA) — leveraging web services and real-time events with modern advances in data warehousing. It offers a glimpse into the world of opportunities made available through advanced SOA — what many in the industry are calling SOA 2.0.

Make Your Business More Responsive

The combination of event-driven architecture (EDA) and SOA as applied to business meaningful events is a potent mixture with the power to do several things for your organization.

• Automate business decisions based on affecting conditions. An example of an application driven by this model is algorithmic financial trading: a system is configured to detect any number of trends in the market and — based on determined thresholds — triggers either alerts to traders or to programs that initiate actual buying and selling processes.
• Reduce latency in business processes associated with logged processing. A manufacturer might configure a system to fill orders based on sales in real time, or even have a sale automatically initiate actual manufacturing processes. Johnson & Johnson dramatically reduced latency in fulfilling new orders for medical products by implementing Shadow real-time technology within its IMS legacy environment.
• Streamline business processes by making your data more useful. This can be achieved through complex event processing (CEP), which Shadow supports. Data is qualified and augmented through the ability to filter it as well as to consult additional relevant data sources and revise or add to the original data as appropriate. For example, a financial services organization required by law to conduct money laundering analysis could configure its system to automatically conduct queries on any transactions exceeding a threshold amount in order to obtain profiles and transaction histories on both the source and target accounts. This enriched mainframe data is now more useable business intelligence that can be processed by financial fraud analysis applications.

Improve Accuracy and Efficiency of Your Business Systems

Incorporating real-time solutions in an organization can make data and application processing more reliable and instantly self-correcting, and can greatly accelerate business processes as well. Specifically:

• Event-driven architectures (EDA) utilize real-time events to maintain data consistency between distributed databases and mainframe systems of record, making your data more accurate and consistent throughout your enterprise.
• EDAs and SOAs can vastly increase the efficiency of your integrated systems because their applications are “decoupled” — that is, unlike API-based integration which is bound together through scripts and protocols, real-time eventing incorporates a publish-subscribe model. Multiple applications can simultaneously subscribe to a published event, unleashing the power of massive parallelism in your system processing.

Shadow real-time event solutions combine the proven benefits of the Shadow family of products with solid support of industry-standard EDA and SOA best practices.

• Re-use of existing expertise — Real-time eventing is administered using Shadow Studio, which provides a single development environment seamlessly integrated within the IDE to expose mainframe applications and data as web services, real-time events, or as direct SQL calls.
• Protection of legacy systems — Event “listeners” require no changes to the mainframe application code.
• Continual operation — Events are detected and logged 24x7.
• Transactional integrity — All events are embedded within the application Unit of Work and never processed until the Unit of Work has been committed, ensuring transactional integrity of the event.
• Standards-based — Captured mainframe events are transformed into XML to facilitate utilization with a broad range of distributed application environments and databases.
• Complex Event Processing (CEP) — The Shadow mainframe event manager can logically evaluate multiple events to enable decoupled, parallel, asynchronous application processing.

Let DataDirect Help Your Business Become More Responsive

If your organization seeks to benefit from real-time event processing that integrates mainframe data and applications, DataDirect’s Shadow product suite can provide a solution.

Mainframe platforms supported include:

Data: Adabas, DB2, IMS/DB, CA-IDMS/DB, native VSAM, CICS/VSAM
Application Business Logic: CICS/TSQ, CICS/TSD

For further information, consult the white papers:

To speak with an expert about how your mainframe platform can take advantage of all the benefits offered by real-time event strategies, please call 1-800-876-3101 or complete a Request for Information form and an account executive will contact you.