Has service-oriented architecture given the mainframe a new breath of life?
It definitely has in terms of the ability now for applications to be rehosted to the mainframe, whether it is z/Linux or applications running on z/OS. From CA’s perspective, we don’t provide applications, we provide management software. You’ve had some exposure to our mainframe 2.0 strategy and the mainframe software management piece. We’re taking that further, building up for an announcement at the Share, [IBM mainframe users’ conference, held Aug. 23-28 in Denver], and we hope to deliver the first pieces of it next May. We’re working with customers to come with a SOA-based [solution]. We’ve been referring to it as a user interface, but it’s a new workplace for how you would manage the mainframe. It involves taking our existing management products and exposing the functions that they provide as Web services and then consuming those Web services in this new management user interface in such a way that we can leap the mainframe forward. A lot of these products still have green screens,
