Tucson, Arizona, brings cactus, cowboys, and golf courses to mind. But there’s a lot more to this desert city than meets the eye: Raytheon Missile Systems, for example. In Tucson, Raytheon develops and manufactures a wide range of missiles for the U.S. military as well as allies abroad.
Raytheon Missile Systems wanted its business operations to be as advanced as its 21st-century missiles. One of its goals was to increase operating efficiency by creating a new web-based application that would completely automate purchasing procedures.
Previously, Raytheon used a manual process: A buyer filled out a form to get a purchase order. The form was then entered into the legacy purchase-order application running on the company’s IBM mainframe. Dealing with that mainframe application, like working with so many applications developed in the 1960s and 1970s, was tedious, cumbersome, and time-consuming.
Transforming Legacy Applications Into SOA Assets
Raytheon turned to Attachmate® Verastream® Host Integrator, a solution that encapsulates mainframe data and logic via the screen interface to participate in today’s service-oriented architectures. Verastream transforms the complete range of legacy applications into SOA assets by exposing business processes as web services, XML, Java, and .NET. components that can be reused for new purposes. No changes to valuable mainframe-application code or associated business processes are required.
With the help of Attachmate Consulting Services, Raytheon recrafted the purchase order system by building a web interface to the purchase-order application. Buyers can now:
- Enter all ordering information on a single screen—an improvement over the old system, which required users to enter each line item on separate screens.
- View all the details of a purchase order on a single web page that combines multiple fields from the legacy application.
- Change or add line items to a purchase order.
- Access multiple purchase orders simultaneously.
The new system now provides these optimized processes to 200 buyers. And because it’s so easy to use, the new system has drastically reduced buyer training time. The savings to Raytheon? An estimated $200,000 per year.
Moving Into a New Era
Verastream Host Integrator enables companies like Raytheon to respond to changing business requirements without sacrificing the rich store of business data residing within their legacy applications. A process known as application modeling gives Verastream its unique ability to build composite applications with a new look and feel.
Verastream delivers rapid results because you can use existing development skills, familiar IT tools, and proven mainframe investments. IT developers without specific web-development expertise can create an object model of a mainframe application. They do it by navigating through the host-application screens and simply click on the fields that will be used in the new application, leaving the original application intact. The resulting object model can perform any transaction supported by the mainframe application, including screen navigation, reads, and writes.
Fast, Flexible Verastream
Verastream Host Integrator is helping Raytheon compete in the new economy by combining web technology with the data assets held within older mainframe applications. What’s more, the fast and flexible Verastream technology enabled quick completion of the project.
“We chose Verastream to web-enable our mainframe purchase order application because it could do the job quickly and was flexible enough to meet all of our architectural requirements,” said Anthony Jones, technical manager for strategic applications at Raytheon. “We also liked the idea of working with Attachmate. Because of our experience with other Attachmate products, we knew the company stood for quality and would be there for the long haul.”
Technical Expertise Comes Through
Jones knew he could count on Attachmate people, as well as Attachmate technology. In addition to traditional consulting, the Attachmate Consulting Services group provides software deployment, custom programming, and enterprise integration. The highly trained staff includes project managers, consultants, and systems engineers. This group also works with a network of trusted business partners to offer the full complement of skills required by a variety of organizations.
“Attachmate has been great to work with, and they really came through for us on this purchase order-system project,” Jones said. “Thanks to Attachmate, our operations are more efficient, and that means better bottom-line performance.”
About Verastream
Whether your applications run on an IBM Mainframe (System z, S/390), IBM iSeries (AS/400), UNIX, HP e3000, or OpenVMS system, Verastream Host Integrator can help modernize them. Verastream-generated services can be mixed, matched, and reused to build composite applications with a new look and feel. No changes to legacy-application code are required, so you can avoid risk while speeding up application integration, application development, and workflow enhancement.
Verastream Host Integrator is part of the Attachmate suite of legacy integration products that accelerate the reuse of legacy aapplications in service-oriented architectures. Verastream solutions provide a complete range of mainframe and web modernization—from basic rejuvenation to customized presentation and sophisticated high-performance integration.