WebLayers launched an automated governance solution for mainframes. An extension of WebLayers' flagship solution, WebLayers Center for z/OS empowers enterprises to take a comprehensive approach to governance as they transition to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

WebLayers has a high market standing in automated SOA governance. The WebLayers Center family provides a policy-based approach to automate what has traditionally been a manual, labor-intensive process of defining and enforcing governance from design to deployment.

Nationwide is among the first companies implementing automated mainframe governance.

"Nationwide takes a very comprehensive approach to governance, and like most large organizations, continues to leverage the mainframe for much of its business-critical data management and processing," said Brad Tussing, AVP at Nationwide. "After better understanding the capabilities of WebLayers for both policy management and governance in our SOA environment, we worked with their development team to extend their technology and principals into the core mainframe environment. The purpose of this initiative is to provide a single solution to define, manage, and enforce policies across a wide variety of asset types throughout the organization."

WebLayers Center for z/OS helps maintain and extend mainframe applications
WebLayers Center for z/OS plays a critical role in helping organizations overcome the challenges they face maintaining and extending mainframe applications including:

• Codifying the institutional knowledge of mainframe programming best practices and guidelines to ensure it is passed along to the next generation of programmers.
• Defining and enforcing application-development policies that ensure efficient utilization of mainframe processing resources.
• Effectively service-enabling mainframe resources as part of the transition to SOA.
• Automating the process of manual code reviews to ensure conformance with company standards, guidelines and best-practices.

Many of the applications that need to be SOA-enabled are mainframe applications
According to a recent report by Gartner, "Policy Management... is the heart of... governance, because policy creation, administration, management and enforcement are critical to the ability to ensure service operation and design."(1)

"In software development and delivery, the success of SOA is dependent on a strong governance environment," said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy, IBM Rational software. "Customers working with IBM and WebLayers are better able to apply automated governance as they adopt modern open-source technology in their mainframe environments to more easily transition to SOA."

"According to a study released last month by IBM user group SHARE, many of the applications that need to be SOA-enabled are mainframe applications. No other vendor has addressed this need," said Gregg Bjork, CEO of WebLayers. "Extending WebLayers Center to the mainframe environment was an easy and logical step for us, and one that many of our existing SOA governance customers have embraced."

Key capabilities announced with WebLayers Center for z/OS

• WebLayers Policy Manager automates the definition, association and management of governance policies and enforcement for mainframe assets  including Cobol and non-source components such as JCL, ISAM and VSAM.
• WebLayers Governors ensure the enforcement of the right policies, at the right time, in the right context.  WebLayers now has Governors that interface with a variety of IT infrastructure that run on the mainframe and open systems to govern mainframe assets.
• WebLayers Center Server has been certified to run on z/OS. 
• WebLayers Policy Libraries provide a collection of pre-built policies including a Mainframe Cobol Library.

(1) Gartner, "Criteria for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets," Daryl C. Plummer & L. Frank Kenney, January 8, 2008