Extending Your Mainframe for More Business Value

Our complimentary full-day seminar will show you how to extend your existing investments in System z, and prepare to take advantage of the mainframe technology and cost-savings.

Will your current IT infrastructure support your plans for business expansion? With System z™ as your IT platform, you can enjoy spectacular business growth without constraint. We'll open the day by taking a look at examples of many companies across different industries that have capitalized on an investment in System z technology to grow their business with ease, open up new opportunities for conducting business and even lower their overall costs. During this introduction, we'll also provide an overview of this seminar, review the nature of the demonstrations to be shown, and discuss the case study we'll explore over the course of the day.

Once you are processing your business transactions on System z, it is easy to extend access to new markets using Web services and other modern technologies. It also opens up innovative ways for your customers to do business with you, for example, through PDAs, cell phones and other devices. Plus, it’s simple and fast to integrate existing processes and data with new programs based on Java™ – which can lead you to more sophisticated, and profitable, business models and products. In this session, you can view live demonstrations of IBM software, including a choreographed business process that mixes high-speed transaction processing with modern Web technologies, giving you the best of both worlds.

XML is a new open-standard paradigm for data and it has recently become pervasive. Why? Because it’s flexible, platform-independent and easy to process, so it’s the key technology for information integration both within and between businesses. The latest version of DB2®, running on the mainframe, can handle XML better than other databases and our live demonstrations will show you why. See how to implement DB2 Web services and extend Java applications to use better SQL support through the data cycles. You’ll come away with a good understanding of why System z with DB2 accelerates growth and innovation.

Initially, companies kept their data warehouses on separate systems, even though the data source was the mainframe. That is no longer necessary, nor optimal. If the operational data resides on System z, it’s better to keep the data warehouse there too. And it’s simpler because synchronization is a breeze thanks to the IBM extract, transform and load tools, which you'll see in action. Learn how System z helps deliver intelligent, data-enriched applications to transactional systems by combining transactional with historical data, and does so without programming. See how the latest zIIP processor gives you a major price/performance boost.

For the promise of SOA to become a reality, you need efficient, flexible and robust communications between all the services and applications in your infrastructure. Point-to-point messaging isn’t enough. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) will provide mediation services to transform and enrich information as it flows between services. Learn how IBM Enterprise Service Bus offerings, especially WebSphere Message Broker, can become the communications backbone between all your service providers and requesters. We will discuss why WebSphere Message Broker, running on System z, is the ideal platform for your ESB.

Although System z has had built-in virtualization for decades, the recent growth of distributed servers has opened up new opportunities for organizations to consolidate and save money. In this session, we'll discuss the state-of-the art virtualization capabilities available on System z, and show you how fast and easy it is to provision new virtual servers. Many companies are doing this already – including IBM itself. We'll share many real-world examples of companies realizing the business benefits of consolidating Linux® virtual servers on System z.

System z is the most secure operating platform, with built-in capabilities to ensure privacy of data and secure processing for your company and extended enterprise. We will discuss the latest capabilities that help you comply, protect data, ensure privacy and reduce risk. You’ll see a demo of how our compliance products uncover potential security exposures that are otherwise not readily apparent. Learn how you and your business partners can leverage your applications with higher confidence and less risk.

Just like the new application development tools, System z now has modern tools available for IT service management, enabling you to operate your growing infrastructure with fewer people and reduced skill levels. Gone are the days of cryptic messages and arcane commands – now there are graphical, advice-rich, intelligent systems management software tools from Tivoli®.

Learn about the latest tools available for application development on System z. These tools, based on the best-of-breed Eclipse platform, will appeal equally to the latest computer science graduate as well as the experienced programmer. Developing, debugging, unit testing and system testing can now be done on an accelerated schedule - as speed is of the essence. You'll see live demonstrations of the latest version of Rational® Developer for System z, and learn how to reduce the time needed to manage and deploy new software releases.

When all is said and done, the new, industry-leading System z10 packs an incredible punch in terms of performance, TCO and innovation. Data center customers have a choice as to where new applications should run, so we’ll conclude today’s seminar with a discussion of the main factors of why they should invest in, and modernize their mainframe assets.