Davis Vision Sets Sights on Integrating System z With Open Systems

by Mary E. Shacklett
July 9, 2008

“When we began designing this customer service portal, we focused very heavily on usability,” says Thibdeau. “We wanted to increase efficiency and at the same time reduce internal training time. For example, instead of establishing a Website as a kind of ‘firewall’ so our members couldn’t talk to customer service, we placed the customer service support phone numbers right on the Website.” 

Davis Vision IT had to learn and incorporate new software integration techniques for the project, but this was offset by the company’s ability to use the business intelligence of existing business transaction logic on the mainframe, simply by repurposing the transactions so they could be optimized for usability. “We did this by redesigning the front-ends of these transactions by going out to user offices, spending time with users, and asking them what they wanted to see,” says Thibdeau. “We then re-engineered the front-ends of these transactions with Web-enabled presentations— powered by real-time System z access from the desktop.” John Drum, Davis Vision’s senior director of Applications Development for Open Systems, explains how this was done. 

“For our Web applications, we used screen scraping and passed unformatted data into a single program under CICS,” says Drum. “There’s a layer of code in the program that parses the unformatted screen data into Web service objects that can then be passed into Web-facing applications on open systems.” 

Could Davis Vision have used a commercial middleware product to accomplish the same objective with less work? 

“We chose not to implement a formal middleware program initially because it carried too heavy a footprint, and our own software integration methodology was a better match for our in-house expertise at the time,” says Thibdeau. “We also recognized we were working with a very straightforward operations environment with z/VSE.” 

Ty Moore adds that Davis Vision IT also had tried different ways to extract data from the mainframe. “In the end, there was nothing more efficient for our environment than the interfacing program we developed to CICS in-house,” says Moore. “It allowed us to easily handle an average of 1.8 million transactions per day. We use DB2, CICS and Java— and transfer information to and from the mainframe on a real-time basis. Our System z CICS program provides logs of all transactions and updates a table, performing updates in 15-second bursts.” 

The results speak for themselves. Davis Vision dramatically improved turnaround on both application development and application enhancements by using screen scraping and other rapid development techniques. “For example, if a client wanted something done to change an application, we could do this over a weekend, and the client would be amazed to see the enhancement in place the following week,” says Thibdeau. “We gained this agility by effectively integrating our System z applications into the Web-based presentation environment, and by creating tables of parameters that are able to alter application and display settings simply by making a change to a variable in a table. This has been a major rapid deployment ‘key’ for us in applications.”