Netron Fusion Enterprise™: integration from both sides.

Most large mainframe-based organizations automated their business-critical operations in the 1980s and early 1990s using COBOL These applications are mature, robust, and continue to provide extremely valuable benefits to the business.

The bulk of new development initiatives are now driven by the need to integrate a web presence with the business system. As business systems have moved out to the laptop, the palmtop and the cell phone of your customers, the pressure to integrate your applications with the enterprise web infrastructure has become greater than ever.

Virtually all current web integration tools treat the host and its programs as something of a "black box", to be accessed but only understood at the lowest level of network and terminal protocols.

Using such a "connection-centric" approach, host-based programs cannot be fully utilized as web components. When the host applications are modified, the web development team must be notified of the change, and its implementation must await their readiness; a failure to manage these extra development steps usually results in the immediate failure of the web components.

How we do it with Netron Fusion Enterprise™

Fusion Enterprise offers a strategic approach to integration that treats the web side and the host side as peers. Building from Netron Fusion's proven development and maintenance capabilities, our enterprise tools can make web and host sides work together seamlessly, both from a development and a runtime point of view.

We believe that an approach that focuses exclusively on legacy connectivity is not enough. The best approach must integrate and simplify development activities so that both the web and the host are managed concurrently. Netron Fusion Enterprise starts with the most logical part of the development chain - the source code for your host applications - and moves out to capture the entire development stream.

We then generate both ends of the integrated application - the host integration components and the web endpoint components - from the same source files. There is now a single point of controlled change - the host source - instead of multiple sources of independent change.

Once your host transaction has been captured and interfaced by our integration tools, our new Web Integration Designer lets you take the generated interface and manage the marshalling and user interfaces that your new customer channels will use to access the legacy applications. Web Browsers, Web Services and Portals are all supported automatically and concurrently. Portable device and multilingual support are built-in. Modifications to the host transaction are immediately deployed to the web server. Integration is easy, fast and automatically embedded into your development workflow.

"Integration from both sides" has two meanings: at runtime, your web and host endpoints adapt to each other; and at development time, web and host maintenance and testing is integrated as well.

For an in-depth discussion of Netron Fusion Enterprise™, download our whitepapers.