Dan2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
Gravic helps businesses transform their IT
Gravic brings support of modernization as its customers look to support hybrid IT; NonStop has rarely been an island.
Gravic
Dan
When it comes to transformation, a topic on which so much is being published, it is hard to ignore that much of what business is calling transformation is simply a reflection of the catch-up being undertaken to modernize platforms, infrastructure, and applications. Hybrid IT and its emphasis on traditional computing being integrated with cloud computing is just the latest catalyst driving this transformation and comes after many years where deployment of client/server computing has matured. If you consider that client/server computing was driven by the growth in deployment of PCs, then today’s hybrid IT is clearly being driven by mobile devices and the ensuing explosion in acceptance of the user experiences that they provide.
“From the perspective of a company modernizing its data and opening it up to share it in ways they did not before,” said Gravic Executive VP, Paul Holenstein, “we have a long history of doing that and yes, this often includes a fair amount of data transformation as well.” The link below will take you to a customer case study describing a recent project Gravic completed for a US government agency, as an example. “This form of modernization opened up their processes to share valuable information in ways that were not possible before, as well as to give them the platform and infrastructure basis to continue to improve on the content they provide to create additional value-add services,” said Holenstein.
Of course, modernizing can take a different tack. In a so-called closed system (for example, where an application and data reside on a legacy, but important mission-critical server), the need to interoperate with other, typically newer and more powerful environments/applications often also drives change. Most of the time, these environments were not designed to directly interoperate. Gravic creates application integration environments to solve this need, often referred to as a real-time business intelligence environment. In this mode, one application is generating certain data as it processes requests, and this information needs to be shared with another application – often on a different platform/environment! “Of course the data from the first application has to be extracted, filtered, cleansed, and transformed into the format the second application needs and then delivered there at the appropriate time using the prescribed protocol/interface,” added Holenstein. “This is also a common and long-standing use of Shadowbase, and I have attached a link about this as an example.”
No discussion on modernization would be complete without broaching the interesting part: How will the new NonStop X (NS X) and Virtualized NonStop (vNS) affect these solutions, or vice versa? “The answer, I think, is that both should have a tremendous impact on each other. NS X and vNS should open up the NonStop to hosting many more applications than previously imagined. However, none of these will typically operate as an island, cut-off from the rest of the world – internet, cloud, other enterprise applications, etc. They will all need to share information and data, likely bi-directionally, all tasks where Shadowbase is proven and adept at doing.”
“Regarding transformation and reflecting on where we have come from, it is very clear that the user experience is driving the need for a new approach on how applications are integrated and deployed and for business to look more closely at private clouds on premise. However, here at Gravic, we do not see the transformation aspect of this movement as new, just accelerated and much more mainstream than when the NonStop ran on proprietary technology. But, time will tell.”
If you would like to know more about transformation and the work Gravic is doing with it in support of modernization, then please feel free to contact Gravic management at shadowbase@gravic.com.
