Microsoft mixes mainframe apps with .Net

When it comes to the mainframe, Microsoft has two distinct personalities. While the software giant would like to believe the Windows platform can replace anything that runs on the mainframe, the reality is that smaller users might want to migrate. However, many users are looking to integrate tried-and-true mainframe applications and processes with next-generation application and network architectures in the form of Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Microsoft thinks they have both camps covered.

The company last month ended a four-year development project and released Host Integration Server (HIS) 2004, which focuses on integrating mainframe, transaction-based applications into the Windows infrastructure, such as links to its BizTalk orchestration engine, and Visual Studio development tool environment. With HIS, Microsoft leaves the screen-scraping technology to partners and provides access directly to mainframes' business logic.

However in contrast to the integration message Microsoft in April formed the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA), which helps users migrate workloads off the mainframe and onto Windows platforms. Last month, the MMA along with 22 partners launched a community Web site aimed at sharing best practices and providing resources to users migrating off mainframes.

"You have to have an integration story, and I think HIS is evolving," says Dale Vecchio, research director with Gartner. "Microsoft is very much going down the path of trying to offer integration as opposed to simply mainframe migration. HIS 2004 is really their first effort to offer this product in this way. It is a reasonable start, but they have a long way to go. At least they've started to suggest that mainframe integration is not a bad thing."

Its HIStory

HIS began as System Network Architecture (SNA) Server in 1992. It has been a gateway product for most of its life, acting as a pass-through for IBM's SNA. Over the years, Microsoft has included other tools such as Component Object Model Transaction Integrator (COM TI), which links Microsoft's COM with IBM's transaction programs on the mainframe, and developed links to DB2, but had not integrated the server with its development tools.

Adding that development tool integration and protocols, such as Host Initiated Processing (HIP), to let either Windows or the mainframe initiate processes on the other platform were milestones with HIS 2004.

"There is a renewed focus on application integration in HIS 2004," says Scott Woodgate, lead product manager for business process and integration at Microsoft.

"From a philosophy perspective, customers are looking to SOA, looking to reuse their existing mainframe access as part of that architecture," Woodgate says. "So we looked at that opportunity and delivered that through Visual Studio and .Net  integration and HIS 2004. It's a very significant area of new ambition for us."

Users are getting in tune with the message, especially through new technology such as the HIP protocol, new to HIS 2004.