Davis Vision Sets Sights on Integrating System z With Open Systems

by Mary E. Shacklett
July 9, 2008

With the future of the operating system resolved, momentum built for Thibdeau’s original assessment that the System z was performing reliably and effectively in delivering mission-critical applications to the business. “With an open systems background, I understood the disadvantages as well as the benefits of open systems,” says Thibdeau. “In open systems, there were a lot of runaway applications with high resource utilization and a general lack of management tools. I knew going in that open systems was no ‘silver bullet’—and that many of the industrial-strength application management tools we needed were those we already had on the System z.” 

Thibdeau felt that Davis Vision IT had to change the perception of the mainframe. “We needed to see the mainframe for what it really was in our environment: a huge server with a wealth of corporate applications and know-how that could be integrated with our other open system resources.” 

Reinventing the Mainframe and Setting Development Priorities 

Thibdeau and his staff recognized that new business methods and workflows would require the Web enablement of core transactions to improve business productivity in customer service, the support staff, and the call center—but the demand didn’t stop there.  

“We also experienced the need from our end customers for applications that performed like the standard medical software they were used to in their offices,” says Ty Moore, Davis Vision vice president of IT. “Many of these medical applications ran in an open systems environment. To respond to the workflow and usability needs of these users, we undertook projects in the open systems environment— and then backed them with System z back-end processing.” 

The first business area Davis Vision targeted for application development and systems integration was e-commerce. 

“Our initial push for e-commerce was aimed at achieving maximum efficiency of applications and of our business workflows,” says Thibdeau. “We wanted to assist our staff in taking orders over the phone, and we also wanted to simplify applications for our customer service representatives. At that time, we were still home-building all our applications, so we adopted a technique of ‘screen scraping’ our 3270 applications to provide users with a more intuitive, browser based interface. This was very successful, and we continued to build on that approach. All the while, we continued to use the CompuVision processing of the System z to support the presentation layer of the application.” 

Aligning IT With the Business 

Thibdeau says the Davis Vision e-commerce project was conducted as a small pilot program to confirm the direction of both the business and the application development.