Corporate Information

DataDirect Technologies (Progress Software)
1500 Perimeter Park Drive, Suite 100
Morrisville, NC 27560 USA
Phone: +1 919 461 4200
www.datadirect.com

Contact Information

Dan Finerty
dan.finerty@datadirect.com
Main: +1 905 852 9004

Calvin R. Fudge
calvin.fudge@datadirect.com
Main: +1 281 634 8266
Alternate: +1 713 503 4182

DataDirect Technologies is the software industry’s only comprehensive provider of software for connecting the world’s most critical business applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging standards.  Developers worldwide depend on DataDirect® products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC TM and ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP.  More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on DataDirect Technologies to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems and to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration.

DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS). Headquartered in Massachusetts, USA, Progress Software is a worldwide leader in application infrastructure software with 1,600 employees and direct and indirect sales and services representation in 90 countries. For more than two decades, Progress has been developing products and technology that provide the infrastructure for applications as diverse as ERP and financial trading, across industries as diverse as retail, manufacturing telecommunications, financial services, and government. Today, Progress products are used at over 60,000 organizations in 140 countries including 90% of the Fortune 500. Our extensive community of more than 2,500 global partners is critical to building and supporting our customers with more than $5 billion of Progress technology, partner applications and services are sold each year to thousands of companies in over 140 countries.

Contrary to popular opinion, mainframe systems still play a significant role in the support of global commerce and government. For modern software products and services to maximize their return on investment, they must have visibility into the data and transaction flow of the mainframe.

The role of the mainframe has dramatically changed with the advent of Web services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). Organizations that rely on mainframe technology need to reduce the complexity of re-using mainframe data and legacy application logic. Application developers are typically not familiar with mainframe data or application logic and require powerful new tools that simplify mainframe SOA enablement and the development of Web services from mainframe data, business logic and screen logic.

Traditional approaches to mainframe integration have relied on technologies that were either too rigid or lacked scalability or created a bewildering array of point-to-point connections that added costs, complexity and risk of failure to an organization’s mission critical infrastructure.  Reducing mainframe integration complexity is at the core of DataDirect’s mainframe integration products and its industry leading product suite, Shadow RTE. 

With DataDirect’s Shadow RTE organizations have only to invest in a single mainframe integration infrastructure to satisfy their integration requirements. This means there is only one vendor to manage...one product architecture to support...one deployment method...and one set of training requirements for all of your mainframe integration and modernization needs. 

Shadow RTE supports a broad range of industry standard APIs or sources to serve as interfaces to a comprehensive list of mainframe data, business logic and screen targets, including:

• Web Services/SOAP:  Data (DB2, Adabas, IMS/DB, VSAM, CA-IDMS)
• Web Services/SOAP: Business Logic: (CICS/TS, IMS/TM, CA-IDMS, Natural)
• Web Service/SOAP: Screen Logic: (CICS/TS, IMS/TM, CA-IDMS, CA-Ideal)
• External Web Services Consumption: consumption of distributed Web services by mainframe applications -  integrates with a wide variety of mainframe languages / environments including COBOL, Natural, CA-IDEAL, ASSEMBLER, FORTRAN and PL/1

• XML (supporting MQ, HTTP/S, JMS transports): DB2, Adabas, IMS/DB, VSAM, CA-IDMS

• ODBC, JDBC, JCA client drivers: Data (Adabas, DB2, IMS/DB, VSAM)
• ODBC, JDBC, JCA client drivers: Business Logic (CICS/TS, IMS/TM, Natural)

• JSP or ASP: Screens (Natural, ADSO, CICS/TS, IMS/TM, CA-IDMS, CA-Ideal
• COBOL, Java, .NET components: Data (Adabas, DB2, IMS/DB, VSAM)
• COBOL, Java, .NET components: Business Logic (CICS/TS, IMS/TM, CA-IDMS, Natural)
• COBOL, Java, .NET components: Screens (CICS/TS, IMS/TM, CA-IDMS

Direct’s Shadow RTE provides a unique, real-time foundation architecture to support all of the industry standard paradigms for integrating mainframe data, business logic and screens with Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and other distributed application development initiatives. With Shadow RTE, an organization gets a robust, multi-threaded, native runtime that provide a real-time foundation architecture for standards-based mainframe integration supporting, Web services/SOA, Real-time events, Direct SQL Access and Web Enablement.
Just as an enterprise service bus (ESB) provides industry standard connectivity between disparate platforms, Shadow RTE provides interoperability across multiple mainframe data and application environments, reducing integration complexity through an ability to act as a mainframe services bus (MSB).

The Shadow RTE serves as the architectural framework underpinning DataDirect’s standards-based mainframe integration products:

• Shadow z/Services - Web services for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Shadow z/Events - real-time events for event-driven integration
• Shadow z/Direct - SQL for direct data access and transactional support
• Shadow z/Presentation - automatic presentation layer generation for extending screen-based applications to the Web

Shadow Studio is a consolidated development environment and comprehensive IDE which provides seamless integration within the IDE to enable developers working with mainframe resources to rapidly create Web services, SQL statements, Real-time event profiles and publish legacy transactions as reusable components to the mainframe.

Shadow RTE became the leader in mainframe integration by offering best-in-class technology capable of handling the mission-critical requirements demanded by the world’s largest enterprises.

See the DataDirect datasheet Modernizing Legacy with SOA Integration and the press release on how Data Direct and Oracle hlped State of Maryland Stays Ahead of Criminals with New Law Enforcement Dashboard.

Florida 17th Circuit Court
Using Advanced SOA and Real-time Events to Streamline Judicial Information

Some of the central challenges faced by the State of Florida’s 17th Judicial Circuit are no different from those faced by other courts systems: a lack of streamlined information flow, potential bottlenecks caused by heavy case loads, and ever-increasing state statutes/regulations.. The systems and programming team at Florida 17th Circuit architected a real-time judicial information case management application, data warehouse, and enterprise reporting system.

The Clerk of Courts stores its information as VSAM data on the Broward County IBM mainframe - the same repository for three out of the five data sources — criminal, civil, and probate databases — that is replicated into the warehouse. Juvenile case data (because of laws dealing with privacy and security issues) maintains data using a proprietary product running a DB2 database on an IBM iSeries platform. The fifth database is the Broward county Sheriff’s Office which supplies arrest data.

The team implemented DataDirect’s Shadow z/Events to bring data from five source databases of various types into a consolidated data warehouse, from which custom reports and ad hoc queries can easily be run.

Shadow z/Events provided the court with a complete facility for merging the real-time capture and publication of changes that occurred within the court’s mainframe database to enable secure, streamlined integration of XML-formatted legacy data with a distributed relational data warehouse.

The court now has an advanced SOA infrastructure to provide up-to-date judicial information and can proactively take on more cases while complying with legislative dictates specifying strict time frames.

Miami Dade County
Using Web Services and SOA to Create a County Information Portal

As the largest metropolitan area in the State of Florida, Miami-Dade County is often referred to as the "Gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean." With an annual budget of $3 billion, Miami-Dade County serves more than 2.2 million residents. To maintain a high level of operational efficiency and ensure quality services to citizens, the County adopted a leading-edge mentality towards information technology.

As Miami-Dade County started work on a new county information portal, the county decided SOA would provide the strategic foundation needed to optimize re-use of legacy IDMS data and application logic. To accelerate deployment of its new county information system, Miami-Dade licensed DataDirect’s Shadow z/Services to wrap existing mainframe logic into ready-to-use Web services and deploy these Web services within the J2EE portal environment.

Miami-Dade first employed Shadow z/Services to build the new Hurricane Shutter Permitting application. Contractors leverage the online application to apply for a permit, pay applicable fees and print the actual permit. To maximize potential reuse down the road, Miami-Dade utilized Shadow z/Services to generate each of the functions within the Hurricane Shutter Permitting application as a callable Web service. Next, Miami-Dade built the Occupational Licensing system which allows contractors to renew licenses and pay fees online.

The true benefit of Shadow z/Services lies in the inherent reusability of Web services within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This open, rapid-integration capability allowed the County to substantially improve its bottom line by deploying new Web services in a fraction of the time and costs required by traditional point-to-point integration.