The recent entry of new vendors into the zIIP exploitation market has caused some confusion among our prospects and partners regarding the difference between Progress DataDirect and its DataDirect Shadow product and NEON Enterprise Software and its line of mainframe utilities. We hope this blog entry will provide some clarification.
Progress DataDirect is not affiliated in any way with NEON Enterprise Software. The mainframe utility products that later formed the basis for NEON Enterprise Software were divested from NEON Systems in
August 2002. Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS) acquired NEON Systems (NASDAQ: NEON) and its Shadow® technology in January 2006 and located its mainframe integration middleware within the DataDirect Technologies operating unit, now referred to as Progress DataDirect.
Unlike any product on the market today, Progress® DataDirect® Shadow® provides a risk-free, proven method for unlocking the zIIP engine to run additional workloads beyond DB2, in particular, the processing involved with integrating mainframes with SOAs. In the new world, the bulk of this processing involves transformation, such as going to-and-from XML as well as other protocol related processing. The Progress DataDirect approach is to implement this new processing in such a way that the customer can quickly and efficiently SOA-enable their current working mainframe transactions to allow the new processing done by Shadow to run economically on the zIIP specialty engine – across a wide range of mainframe target systems including CICS, IMS, IDMS, Natural, DB2, Adabas, IMS and VSAM. With Shadow, Progress DataDirect has implemented an efficient mechanism for switching between ineligible zIIP environments - like CICS transactions, which must run on standard central processors - and our own processing code, which runs in enclave SRB mode, and is eligible to run on zIIPs.
In the SOA environments we serve, the Shadow code constitutes the majority of the processing involved to transform the mainframe transaction into a Web service. Shadow does not cause IBM or other third party code to become zIIP-enabled.