Layer 7 Technologies Introduces Drop-in Solution for Mainframe SOA Enablement, Interoperability and Governance

Business Wire, Feb 25, 2008

New Hardware-Accelerated Appliance Incorporates Mainframe Applications into SOA for Highly Secure Performance

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Layer 7 Technologies, a leading provider of security and performance solutions for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0, today announced the availability of its SecureSpan[TM] Mainframe SOA Gateway, a secure high performance mainframe SOA appliance. The appliance is used to expose mission-critical mainframe applications, business logic and data as a composite business service without costly coding or porting efforts. The SecureSpan Mainframe SOA Gateway offers support for industry standards and runtime orchestration technology powered by GT Software, a provider of rapid SOA development solutions that leverage mainframe resources.

As the applications for XML data, Web services and SOA continue to expand within the enterprise, customers require the broadest possible support for both existing and future enterprise infrastructure. Incorporating revenue-bearing mainframe processing systems into enterprise SOA deployments and Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) is an urgent and serious business problem for many of the world's largest corporations. The SecureSpan Mainframe SOA Gateway extends Layer 7's intuitive, declarative approach to creating, publishing and controlling service interfaces to encompass mainframe applications and data. Services can be composed through a simple point-and-click graphical interface with no coding or special skills required to address security concerns.

"IT modernization remains a high priority to company leaders and modernizing the applications on their mainframes (making them service centric in many cases) falls under that priority," said Frank Kenney, Research Director, Application Development and Integration, Gartner Research. "Any SOA initiative such as this requires careful consideration, planning and execution and it must also include SOA governance organization, methodology, best practices and technology."

"Implementing effective SOA requires incorporating all of the key assets of enterprise IT, including legacy and third-party services," said Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partner, ZapThink, LLC. "Part of this vision requires exposing XML and Web services interfaces to mainframe applications in order to give enterprise architects broader reach and value for their architectural investment."

The SecureSpan Mainframe SOA Gateway is the only appliance-based mainframe SOA enablement product to support IMS (conversational and non-conversational), CICS BMS and COMMAREA applications, Link3270, TN3270, and mainframe data. Customers can create composite services incorporating one or all of the mainframe environments without requiring WebSphere MQ connectivity.

"Mainframe SOA has emerged as a critical requirement for enterprise SOA initiatives," said Robert Morris, Chief Strategy Officer, GT Software. "GT Software has enjoyed over 25 years as a leader in integrating mainframe applications and data with various other technologies. GT Software's Ivory Service Architect supports deployment of mainframe-based Web services across the widest range of platforms, providing organizations with broad flexibility in where they choose to house SOA-related workload. No other solution on the market today offers such a variety of options for mainframe SOA."

In addition to quickly enabling Mainframe SOA, the SecureSpan Mainframe SOA Gateway provides advanced identity and message level SOA security for applications. Individual messages are filtered, validated, encrypted and signed with complete control over every aspect of message processing to ensure the utmost in security for mission-critical applications. Layer 7 supports a wide variety of standards, specific and technologies including WS-Security, WS-Policy, X.509, SAML, LDAP, UDDI and others.

"Layer 7 has always understood that SOA is about creating services using any application, regardless of vendor, platform or codebase," said Toufic Boubez, Chief Technical Officer, Layer 7 Technologies. "The SecureSpan Mainframe SOA Gateway gives our customers the ability to promote mainframe applications to true first class citizens in enterprise SOA implementations."

The SecureSpan Mainframe SOA Gateway is delivered as a linearly scalable, high performance 64-bit, multi-processor, 1U appliance with onboard XML and optional crypto acceleration and will be generally available in March 2008.

For those attending the SHARE Conference in Orlando, you can learn more about the SecureSpan Mainframe SOA Gateway by visiting Layer 7 at booth # 816. To schedule a one-on-one with a Layer 7 representative, please contact Victoria Freeman at vfreeman@highroad.com

About GT Software

GT Software is a leading global provider of rapid SOA development solutions that leverage mainframe resources, making the mainframe an active participant in SOA initiatives. With GT Software's products, mainframe developers can quickly and easily model, automate, and extend mainframe processes for deployment as key components of an enterprise SOA solution. With more than 2,000 installations worldwide, GT Software provides high-quality, innovative and cost-effective solutions for many Fortune 1000 companies. To learn more please visit www.gtsoftware.com.