Cape Clear, Neon in Web services deal

Cape Clear Software and Neon Systems Inc. on Wednesday announced they are working together to integrate their respective technologies and allow users to quickly integrate mainframe applications and data through the use of Web services.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies will more tightly bind Cape Clear’s Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with Neon Systems’ Shadow z/Services product. This will allow mainframe-based applications to be offered as services over a network more reliably and cost effectively, according to officials from both companies.

“Any enterprise integration project has to ensure that valuable mainframe resources can participate as a first class citizen in the enterprise. I think Neon Systems enables users to more quickly integrate the mainframe and so be able to deliver a range of different services that can fit within an ESB infrastructure,” said Annrai O’Toole, Cape Clear’s CEO.

Version 5.0 of Cape Clear’s ESB is at the heart of the collaboration between the two companies. Built on a Systems Oriented Architecture (SOA), Version 5.0 allows corporate IT shops to create new Web services from their existing infrastructure and also allows them to deliver those services to both their internal users and external business partners, according to company officials.

Corporate developers can also use the product’s core capabilities to piece together more intelligent integrations using routing and business rules as well as leverage the existing skills and resources of their IT staffs and computing resources, Xeon officials contend.

Neon’s Shadow product line, designed to support Event-Driven Architectures (EDA), is a SOAP-based mainframe integration series of products that better enable IT shops to turn mainframe applications into Web services. Users can create Web services from IBM’s CICS and IMS host-based infrastructure software, as well as with Advantage CA-IDMS applications, company officials said.

For more information about the agreement and technical information about each company’s products, users can to go www.capeclear.com and www.neonsys.com.