The mainframe crowd can be a tough audience -- the culture tends to be conservative, the practitioners are sticklers about security and performance, and they greet new technology with a healthy degree of skepticism. So the notion of using a newer technology like an enterprise service bus (ESB) for mainframe integration will have to prove itself, said Jody Hunt, senior product marketing manager at Iona Technologies, Waltham, Mass.
That's just what vendors like Iona and Neon Systems, in Sugar Land, Texas, are setting out to do with their ESB-type mainframe integration products. "The mainframe world is further along with Web services than with ESBs," Hunt said. "They're somewhat reconciled that Web services are OK now."
A lot of corporate data still resides in mainframes, yet integration remains a problem in the mainframe world. Typical point-to-point connections require software and hardware that can be costly to maintain and can hinder business agility.
