The adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an approach to provide a more effective means to leverage mainframe data and other disparate legacy applications is growing. Perhaps ironically, enterprises are also challenged with another crucial element that would enable the realization of a comprehensive SOA strategy: Batch processing. Despite the intense focus on leveraging the mainframe, companies - especially those within the financial services and insurance realms - are encountering the dilemma of how to incorporate these massive transactions in bulk into their SOA.
Let's say you've decided on an SOA. You need multioperation business services to garner the advantages of the SOA, but you've also encountered the proverbial roadblock: your company performs batch processing every 24 hours, and there is only a small window of time to complete it. How is it possible for you to implement a comprehensive SOA strategy that will enable your batch systems to not only talk to external Web services, but to CICS and IMS applications as well?
