MAINFRAME ADAPTER VENDOR Neon Systems on Monday announced availability of Shadow Console, a Windows-based management, monitoring, and debugging tool to boost mainframe integration with distributed applications. The tool checks interactions between the mainframe and applications such Java or Microsoft .Net applications. Shadow Console is “an operations console for people using our [Shadow] connectivity solution,” said Jeff Overton, product manager at Neon, in Sugarland, Texas. The console simplifies detection of application connectivity problems. Mainframe and non-mainframe-oriented personnel can identify and resolve problems affecting the performance and availability of an application during the development cycle as well as in deployment. Diagnostics data is provided in a modern GUI. Built for both developers and production operations personnel, Shadow Console consolidates information from Shadow Client interfaces, which are Neon’s application client-side components, and data from the Shadow Server, which is the corresponding component on the z/OS mainframe. For automatic monitoring, system alerts and exceptions can be detected by Shadow Console and forwarded via SNMP to a customer’s existing network management system. Technology Industry