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This article deals with leveraging service-oriented architectures (SOA) and legacy systems. SOA allows enterprises to share common application services and information. This sharing is accomplished either by defining application services that can be shared and therefore integrated, or by providing the infrastructure for such application service sharing. Application services can be shared by hosting them on a central server or by accessing them inter-application. Using tools and techniques of application integration gives us the opportunity to learn how to share common application services. More than that, these tools and techniques create the infrastructure that can make such sharing a reality. By taking advantage of this opportunity, we are integrating applications so that information can be shared, even as we provide the infrastructure for reusing business logic. Unfortunately, existing legacy systems, such as mainframes, are difficult to access at service levels, exposing their behavior to other applications. While newer systems may be created to expose Web services, existing systems must either be rebuilt to leverage an SOA or have a service abstraction layer placed upon it. So how do you allow legacy/mainframe systems to leverage SOA. First, it is a matter of understanding when to leverage SOA, identifying the proper patterns of use for back-end systems, and selecting the right enabling technology to expose the services encapsulated in your mainframe.

Presents information on the integration of portals with the enterprise's legacy applications. Information on why portals require integration; Importance of legacy integration; Data on host access and legacy integration portlets. INSET: takeways.

Provides information on how to create new applications that reuse information locked away in legacy systems. Replacement of existing systems; Replication of an existing system; Ways of reusing legacy data and logic.

The article discusses the integration of legacy systems in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The use of legacy applications in various SOA-based initiatives offers several benefits including the elimination of the need for architectural changes, lower risk and the ability of businesses to gain competitive advantage. Organizations need to investigate solutions that can deal with strategic applications when evaluating legacy integration. Several factors must be considered when looking for a legacy integration solution including an approach for reusing legacy functionality abstract service creation.

This article discusses on the use of host integration in the healthcare sector. In today's highly dynamic healthcare market, smart organizations look to the future. To integrate and modernize the healthcare enterprise, information technology (IT) organizations must find a cost-effective, low-risk method to consolidate and Web-enable the many departmental applications that run the hospital system. To do this, network administrators are turning to host integration to modernize the diverse mix of legacy systems running the hospital. Host integration solutions enable IT organizations to streamline operations quickly and effectively, saving the time and the money the company would have spent producing the logic for the more labor-intensive scenario. Host integration makes it easier for IT to ensure that information is accessible across regulatory, clinical, operational and administrative areas, ensuring a quick return. Healthcare web applications can ensure that patient services are managed more productively , reducing wait times, and enabling administrators to manage patient flow more efficiently. In sum, host integration helps healthcare organizations build on existing IT investments to cut costs, drive productivity, and share patient data and resources more effectively.

Interviews Rick Skinner, chief information officer of Providence Health Systems, on the role of information technology (IT) in healthcare. Views on healthcare quality and patient safety; Significance of IT to healthcare costs; Effect of legacy systems on healthcare delivery; Use of integration technology.

This article interviews Jim Rhyne, engineer for eServer Tools Technology and Enterprise Modernization at IBM, and Scott Cosby, program director of WebSphere Business Integration at IBM, on their perspectives about legacy integration. For Rhyne, legacy integration means building software services that combine existing applications on the mainframe with combined business components that are written on distributed systems such as Java and .NET. According to Cosby, legacy integration involves bringing together people, processes and information. With people, it is about incorporating their expertise and business knowledge, and enabling them to bring this together with processes and information to make informed, timely decisions. Regarding information, there is not single repository with all of the company's information. Tools are needed to bring information from all different systems and provide a historical view of where the information came from, so people across the organization can make more intelligent, responsible decisions. Finally, when viewing processes, organizations need to have the capability to tie together existing and new processes that help drive their overall business.

This section introduces a series of articles on a variety of strategic business integration issues, including enterprise content integration, Service-Oriented Architecture, Web Services, legacy systems, etc.

This article discusses the application of the concept of eminent domain in information technology (IT). The challenges of integration have often been compared to the challenges of city planning. The rule of eminent domain may be a good case study. The power that governments can wield to seize and redevelop property for the common good offers some suggestions for practices that may well be applicable in optimizing enterprise IT infrastructures. The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 19 of the California Constitution allow private property to be taken by eminent domain for a public use. This term may be interpreted very broadly by the courts, and the project need not be actually public to constitute a public use. Instead, generally, only a public benefit is required. Elimination of blight through redevelopment projects is a public benefit that satisfies the public use requirement of federal and state constitutions. The challenges of redeveloping legacy integration infrastructures have parallels with redevelopment of legacy industrial brownfields. Fragmented interfaces, irregular data definitions and inconsistent operational standards that grew rapidly in the 1980s and 90s as the result of project silos working with constantly changing technology have left behind an integration landscape that is a mess.

This article features iWay Legacy Data Adapters computer software from iWay Software. With the comprehensive set of data adapters found within iWay's Universal Adapter Framework, iWay delivers the ability to connect Java, Web services and .NET applications to legacy data, Using an open programming interface, iWay provides open database connectivity, OLE DB, JDBC, and a native application program interface for accessing heterogeneous data. It can convert American National Standards Institute (ANSI) structure query language (SQL) to iWay's native Data Manipulation Language (DML) for relational data sources and provides ANSI SQL support for non-relational data sources. iWay's DML achieves its superior data retrieval capabilities by using native database application program interfaces and C or Java-based interfaces. Equally important, for disparate data sources, it supports tasks such as joins and two-phased commits for relational and non-relational data sources. For example, iWay can perform a join on tables from Adabas and integrated database management system. In addition to data access, iWay provides a complete set of tools for creating metadata from both relational and non-relational data sources. iWay's enhanced metadata capabilities extend to include the ability to create virtual field definitions for any data source.

This article asserts that Web services can be used in legacy integration in place of enterprise application integration (EAI) software. The mandate for legacy integration was a boon for EAI software over the last five years. Following massive investments in software and hard coding, however, many EAI investments have run nearly full-circle and now often present their own legacy burden. While the degree of necessity for integration has grown significantly, few chief information officers would brag about the flexibility of their EAI infrastructure. Although traditional EAI remains an option for integrating applications, the quite-yet-ubiquitous expansion of Web services has opened a new realm for integration possibilities, those which offer the chance to redefine the notion of application integration. The fact that pieces of information may be needed in the same application or context does not mean it must be integrated at its source. Most often, it is better that information remain in its native application location, due to both the cost and effort that would otherwise be involved in integration, as well as maintaining the original integrity of information. Applying incremental integration based on Web services standards allows firms to address tactical objectives such as quick return on investment, rapid deployment and realization of strategic objectives.

This article discusses about legacy integration. Prior to expanding and expounding on legacy integration issues, it is important to understand precisely what is meant by that most misused of words, legacy. All to often it is used to denote something of past its prime or of no use. This might be the case in certain instances but is by no means the case in all situations. However, there is one aspect of legacy that does bear closer inspection; the one the cuts to the heart of integration. It boils down to one key word: understanding. Without understanding, there can be no definition of legacy that is useful and legacy that is not. Attempting to work with legacy systems, code or data without first gaining a complete understanding of what an organization is currently maintaining is analogous to letting a surgeon perform and operation on you before anyone has diagnosed what is wrong. No information technology personnel should allow anyone near their legacy infrastructure without a clear idea of what all the various bits and pieces do. There are two questions to ask when planning on integrating legacy systems. First, how long will integration last? Second, do I want to integrate or do I want to create interoperability between systems?

This article focuses on the use of modernized legacy applications. Allegedly, legacy transformation, the automatic transformation of legacy languages, such as COBOL, or PL/I, to modern languages, such as Java, is dying. Such transformation projects are losing their appeal because the business model is flawed. Source code translation is an imperfect and complete system replacement process. Third-Generation Language structure does not translate well into Object-Oriented constructs, and language transformation ignores the substantial environmental changes necessary for success. Application Portfolio Management reads application source code and builds an enterprise-wide knowledge base to serve as the source of truth for all applications, with role-based access so that programmers tap application knowledge and information technology management gains visibility into application. Apparently, service orientation promises to fulfill component reuse claims never quite realized in the shift from procedural languages to Object-Oriented (OO) languages and component-based development. Reuse issues surfaced in Third-Generation Language, and while OO and Component-Based Development created an infrastructure and some standards, the level of granularity was too small to be of direct value to the business.

This article provides information on installation options for legacy integration. Application integration is a common theme underlying electronic business, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management and many other modern business strategies. Enterprises use integration to enable faster, more-effective cooperation among a range of business units and people. As more modern application architectures continue to spread, organizations with an install base of working applications are faced with a disconcerting choice. Options fall into three categories, such as extend, replace or migrate. Replacement options include packaged software or complete redevelopment. Migration options include conversion as-is, or transformation to a new language and platform. For many, the risks are beyond their tolerance level, or simply costly. Legacy extension, or integration, with new, more modern architectures can be relatively low cost and low risk. Applications can be modernized for the World Wide Web by means of several architectural patterns. Allegedly, alternative presentation approaches render a terminal-oriented user interface in a Web form, leaving the presentation logic nearly unchanged.

This article focuses on legacy integration in information technology. Any application that was not designed to support the distributed architecture du jour is said to be a legacy application. Early integration efforts were primarily batch file transfers or the later use of remote job entry emulation. Allegedly, older applications typically represent an integration challenge, regardless of the type of deployment platform, which were written either for efficiency or to take advantage of proprietary platform features. Apparently, there are many reasons that mainframe applications represent a special challenge to integration efforts, or, that the encroachments of integration efforts represent a special challenge to mainframe users. Mainframe performance, security, local resource, and transaction management, among others, have always been more carefully managed on the mainframe than other platforms. Furthermore, the mainframe offers increased facilities for such a purpose than were generally available on open platforms. Such properties made the mainframe environment less attractive for cheap, distributed computing architectures, so that distributed integration technologies have tended to develop outside the mainframe first.

This article discusses about legacy integration. Prior to expanding and expounding on legacy integration issues, it is important to understand precisely what is meant by that most misused of words, legacy. All to often it is used to denote something of past its prime or of no use. This might be the case in certain instances but is by no means the case in all situations. However, there is one aspect of legacy that does bear closer inspection; the one the cuts to the heart of integration. It boils down to one key word: understanding. Without understanding, there can be no definition of legacy that is useful and legacy that is not. Attempting to work with legacy systems, code or data without first gaining a complete understanding of what an organization is currently maintaining is analogous to letting a surgeon perform and operation on you before anyone has diagnosed what is wrong. No information technology personnel should be allow anyone near their legacy infrastructure without a clear idea of what all the various bits and pieces do. There are two questions to ask when planning on integrating legacy systems. First, how long will integration last? Second, do I want to integrate or do I want to create interoperability between systems?

This article evaluates the Transformation Server from DataMirror Corp. Using Transformation Server's proprietary change data Capture Transform and Flow technology, companies can share vital information with customers , partners and employees, improving service levels, and can also maximize exiting heterogeneous information technology investments, reducing total cost of ownership. With its Direct Peer-to-Peer Integration feature, users are ensured that information flows in the most efficient and fastest path directly between publisher and subscriber systems, while maximizing information delivery to employees and allowing them to make intelligent business decisions based on the most current information. The Change Data Capture feature improves operational efficiency and saves time and resources by eliminating redundant data transfer and saving network bandwidth. The Zero Programming Requirement and Multi-Platform Support features negate the need to hire expensive programmers or learn new syntax to program languages. Companies can leverage their legacy systems and integrate data across all supported platforms without making change to their existing environment. The High-Performance communications feature improves integration network performance and robustness and makes efficient use of available bandwidth.

Evaluates the host integration server Verastream from WRQ Inc. Legacy systems supported and integrated by Verastream adapters; Modules contained in the unified Verastream platform; Availability of the integration software.

Evaluates the WRQ Verastream, a host of integration server that exposes legacy data and logic for reuse in new business initiatives. Details on integrating, extending and securing legacy applications; Key product modules; Availability.