* Microsoft's Host Integration Server
Microsoft has always coveted IBM’s mainframe users. And now it has introduced perhaps its strongest inducement for those users to at least think about Microsoft in the latest release of its Host Integration Server.
Four years in the works, HIS 2004 integrates mainframe, transaction-based applications into the Windows infrastructure, such as links to its BizTalk orchestration engine, and Visual Studio development tool environment.
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. HIP lets the host system make calls into the Windows environment enabling for example, the mainframe to populate a form on the Windows platform and kick off a print process. HIP tricks the mainframe environment into thinking it is making calls locally.
There’s lots more info on this topic. See: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/102504specialfocus.html
