GT Software unveils software to link legacy data to SOAs GT Software next week will formally unveil its platform for outfitting mainframe applications with Web services functionality and linking legacy data into SOAs (service-oriented architectures).Conforming to Web Service Interoperability Organization (WS-I) standards, GT’s Ivory Web Services provides a programmatic solution without requiring programming for deploying Web services applications, GT said. Developers can include legacy applications in an SOA, generating Web services for mainframe applications and data and consuming other Web services.Ivory Web Services features Ivory Studio and Ivory Server. Ivory Studio is a Windows PC-based development application for graphically building and publishing Web services from mainframe assets. Ivory Server is a mainframe-based SOAP server for deploying Web services. Users of the platform can generate WSDL without long development time and high costs, GT said. “[Ivory Server] is a mainframe-based solution running CICS, and it gives you the ability to build Web services for existing mainframe applications and also allows you to access data on the mainframe from within those mainframe applications from not only the process layer but also the data layer,” said Sal Apollo, vice president of sales at GT.As an example of how the product works, a user site could expose information from a CICS-based insurance application on a mainframe as a Web service.Ivory Web Services, which has been available for about a month, costs approximately $150,000 based on configuration. Software Development