Johannesburg, 14 Apr 2000
Middleware has long been a concept which has eluded an accurate definition, and yet as the need for total interconnectivity between systems is driven to the point of being crucial by the e-commerce wave, these solutions become more and more necessary.
International software house Sybase has taken the lead in this arena of the IT market, and successfully compiled a set of packages that delivers a complete middleware solution for true connectivity between systems.
The company's relational database background has helped it to understand the meaning of middleware, and from this understanding came the development of highly robust and scalable solutions to address all needs from data management to cross-platform integration and replication.
The whole idea behind the enigmatic middleware concept is transparency of data. The ultimate goal is to create the ability to access, manipulate and safely store company data, regardless of the platform or database on which the information is held and to form a complete view of the company as a whole from a single workstation. This data cloud must also be capable of alteration from a single interface with changes reflected in each system housing the files.
It is crucial for any large organization to have this data at its fingertips if for no other reason than administrative and analytical purposes. But most technology investments are made to solve specific problems in specific locations or departments, and span a host of disparate systems ranging from mainframes to mobile platforms, making the realization of total enterprise integration a thorny problem.
To bring this vision to reality, Sybase created its Connect product offerings in two flavours; Sybase Enterprise Connect and Mainframe Connect. These packages complement one another and together offer complete integration for any size enterprise.
Mainframe Connect enables high-performance access to all mainframe data and online production applications in CICS, IMS/TM, MVS and DB2/MVS environments. Enterprise Connect provides true distributed transactional replication and location-transparent, application-independent data access among heterogenous data sources in an easy to install and low maintenance package.
Regardless of the number of different database technologies being used by the company, these solutions provide the unification of all information resources from mainframes to the Web into one seamless, coordinated, easily accessible and very powerful corporate asset that appears and works as one virtual system. This gives the organization a significant and easurable competitive advantage in whatever area of business it may operate in.
The integration is also a prerequisite for the new breed of call centers, sales force automation, and customer self-service applications, all of which are critical to an organizations success and profitability. Enterprise connect even includes a client-side application development kit for building and deploying new interfaces for the complete integration of any client application, SQL or non-SQL data sources, and any application service regardless of the hardware or OS.
In today's ultra-competitive business world, solutions such as these give companies, the flexibility and agility they require to thrive, while protecting and leveraging their existing technology investments.
In addition, Sybase can provide the back-office systems upon which these solutions depend in the form its Adaptive Server Enterprise 11.9.2 database. This solution offers the flexibility and high performance of a true enterprise-class database, as well as unique features that allow adaptation to the unpredictable requirements of the Internet, maintaining full backward-compatibility for applications built for previous versions.
Management and replication of data interfaces through Adaptive Server Enterprise Replication (ASER). This solution allows the distribution of information across any number of databases, anywhere in the world, with mixed version support making it even easier to deploy large numbers of replicated servers.
These core products can be implemented individually or as part of a complete Sybase middleware solution, in any organisation ranging from a single-user database to a globe-spanning enterprise. The rich functionality and industry leading feature sets provide for
all user databases and integration requirements in today's fast-paced and IT dependent world.
The use of middleware is no longer a murky fog to venture into blindly, but a necessity to the survival of a business. These Sybase products eliminate the uncertainty surrounding the concept and deliver true interconnected enterprise systems.
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