What is an eco-system?
Firstly, an eco-system is a virtual global marketplace where customers, vendors, consultants, education specialists, developers and analysts come together in one place to exchange ideas, promote products, services and solutions and generally share knowledge, experience, news and best practices. This is a multi-directional portal where all parties involved can communicate about the chosen subject.

So, Why Mainframe technology?
Despite decades of negative discussion relating to the most efficient platform ever shipped, Mainframes are far from dead. Sure, back in the 80's we all experienced incredible growth of PC's and UNIX based boxes, which did affect the old mainframe shipment volume, but as new uses for mainframe became obvious (e.g., e-business and internet trading), mainframes started to regenerate into smaller, sleeker, more powerful, cheaper devices. In addition we saw problems in the distributed market as Unix servers starting falling over with capacity and storage problems.

IBM in their wisdom introduced Z-series with very attractive T&C's and low entry points which made their latest technology extremely competitive. So much so, that IBM ended 2004 with the most profitable quarter in history., but what about the software, has it kept up with hardware?

Enterprise Software
On this site we will provide information relating to all mainframe software - CICS, IMS, DB2 all tool products (IBM and non-IBM) and everything related to the delivery of products and solutions.

When we speak of enterprise software or legacy systems, CICS is probably the most successful legacy product of all time. CICS developed over 35 years ago in a sleepy little village in Hursley, England, still dominates the transactional processing market to the tune of 30 Billion transactions each day or another way to look at it the equivalent of 1 Trillion dollars each day is transacted over CICS middleware around the world. It is very hard to argue with the pedigree of a product with such a great heritage. The financial exchanges around the world depends on the robustness of CICS to ensure integrity of their systems is upheld. CICS is said to generate $1B each year for IBM and it continues to beat the odds of survival.

Today's CICS has evolved into a 21st century product that delivers all the latest technology enhancements and allows customers to easily integrate, manage and control applications throughout the network.

CICS Transaction Server for z/OS version 3.1 delivers support with SOA and Web Services. V3.1 can now act as both a Web Services provider and as a Web Services requestor, so IT staff can integrate CICS based business logic into the fabric of their entire architecture.

So, what does it mean for you! The mainframe customer or vendor
The intention of mainframebusiness.com is to provide you with the opportunity to come to one location to find answers to technical problems, find a solution or a system integrator in your region of the world. To listen to independent views, other customers experiences and of course access mainframe vendors around the world supporting this platform.

We will conduct and publish polls allowing you the opportunity to voice your opinion on the value of specific features/functionality of products. We will provide blogs and forums to enable customers and vendors to talk together. News, events and announcements will all be shared. And we will provide easy access to other related ecosystems. So bookmark this location as your knowledge base for mainframe related business.

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