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Anybody who knows me and my views on SOA will know that I have a strongly held view that SOA will only deliver the goods if it is pervasive and will only become pervasive if it can include not only the latest coolest technology but also what to some is “boring” or “legacy”. I have previously commented on the need to include Excel. The case is even stronger with the mainframe, the death of which has been predicted for more years than I have worked in this industry.

As I was reading about IBM and SOA in IBM’s annual report which I previously commented on, I spotted another proof point that not only are mainframes not going away but the trend is in fact upwards: 2005 was the best year for IBM mainframe sales since 1998 and shipments of the zSeries mainframe were up by 28% over 2005. This of course means that anybody considering building a pervasive architecture such as SOA must incorporate mainframe based applications into their approach.

Luckily there are a number of companies with deep expertise in the mainframe space, providing solutions to extending SOA to the mainframe. I stress deep because any decent solution requires significant knowledge of mainframe technology which typically means that you need to look for a company which is primarily mainframe centric rather than a SOA company which sees mainframes as just another tickbox.

As I say there are a number of companies which provide these capabilities, but I would like to highlight one (GT Software) for no better reason that I am familiar with their products and like their approach which follows what I would regard as SOA best practices: easy to install with little training required and easy to use while being a mainframe native product set. Another well known vendor is Seagull Software and I am sure IBM has something in its recently announced 31 SOA products which does the job!

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