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The world today is flooded by "new technology", and so is also the good ole mainframe environment. Although much of the new things that are being noised about are hypes and doesn't really bring any added values or improvements at the end of the day, there are others that cannot be ignored whether we like them or not.
Many sites today are facing demands in IMS support for new de facto standards and business opportunities like:
To meet these challenges, we can see loads of new and complex technologies being rolled out, like Sysplex (XCF/XES/CF), ICRF, WLM, ARM, RRS, APPC/MVS, VTAM generic resources, TCP/IP, IMS n-way data sharing, IMS shared message queue, HALDB, FDBR, OTMA, IMS Connect, MQ's IMS bridge, etc.
Now, all these new technologies are not always unique in their functionalities. Some of them overlap, some are not applicable to certain installations, some are more or less contra productive, and so forth. So, already at this point, it's not so easy to maintain focus...to keep up with what's the most preferable way to go...to not fall short on those classical strengths. And as more or less all mainframe sites today also have a heterogenous environment (Windows, UNIX, VMS, etc.) to maintain on top of their mainframe, it's natural to feel some hesitation about what's right or wrong in my environment.
Bluetrue's business is not to have an easy answer to everything, but to help shed some light and share some experiences. And in parallel practically assist in systems programming work, both related to these new challenges as well as to the traditional where deep skill in SMP, system utilities, assembler programming, performance & tuning, and trouble shooting are the classical.