By Paul Korzeniowski, Contributor,
It's lunchtime at Chrysler, and while most employees are deciding what to eat, a foreman at the Belvidere, Ill., assembly plant has something else on his mind: transmission valves. He takes a seat behind an IBM 3270 terminal, enters a series of commands to access data in the company's IBM DB2 mainframe database-management system, and checks to see how many transmission valves were used during the morning's production run.
If the inventory is getting low, the foreman calls Chrysler's central-purchasing department, a 100-person group, and reports how many more valves are needed and how quickly. An employee in the purchasing department jots down the information, calls one of the company's valve suppliers, and orders the parts.
Sometimes the process proceeds smoothly and the valves arrive without a hitch. In other cases, calls are not returned promptly, suppliers don't have the parts in stock, and shipments have to be sent via special deliveries, an expensive and blood-pressure raising process.
The advent of the Internet and desktop computing, however, has forced large companies like Chrysler to find a way to seek efficiencies and tighten their bonds not only with suppliers, but internally as well. Not surprisingly, vendors have risen to the challenge, introducing Web browser interfaces that access mainframe data -- an approach that fits nicely with the rising interest in e-business.
"With the growth of electronic commerce, corporations now have to offer business partners a way to access important information, which is usually housed on mainframes," said Stephen Clark, president and CEO at OpenConnect, an Ottawa, Ontario-based supplier of Web-to-mainframe connectivity packages. "Browser access eliminates the problems that come from needing to provide access to a wide range of desktop operating systems."
Best Of Both Worlds
"Despite all of the talk about client/server computing in the early 1990s, few large corporations actually moved much information off their mainframes," says Don Czubeck, president of Gen2 Venture, a Saratoga, Calif., consultancy that specializes in mainframe connectivity.
Next: Getting smart about dumb terminals (page 1/3)
While adding a slick interface to a mainframe application may seem as futile as putting four new tires on a 1972 Gremlin, it does solve an emerging problem for large organizations that are moving forward and embracing the Net in daily business practices, yet still have 70 percent to 80 percent of their data housed on mainframes from the 1970s and 1980s.
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