Mainframe Computing and Information Quality

Looking for new ways to use the power of your mainframe? My friend Wally called me the other day and was talking about moving applications off the mainframe to the Unix platform and cleansing data during the migration. “Sure, we can help you with that.” I said. But he was surprised to hear that there is a version of the Trillium Software System that is optimized for the Mainframe (z/OS server). We’ve continually updated our mainframe data quality solution and we have no plans to stop.

Mainframe computers still play a central role in the daily operations of many large companies. Mainframes are designed to allow many simultaneous users and applications access to the same data without interfering with one other. Security, scalability, and reliability are key factors to the mainframe’s power in mission-critical applications. These applications typically include customer order processing, financial transactions, production and inventory control, payroll, and others.

While others have abandoned the mainframe platform, the Trillium Software System supports the z/OS (formerly known as OS/390) environment. Batch data standardization executes on either a 64-bit or 31-bit system. It also supports CICS, the transactional-based processing system designed for real time processing. z/OS and CICS easily support thousands of transactions per second, making it a very powerful data quality platform. The Trillium Software System can power your mainframe with an outstanding data quality engine, no matter if your data is stored in DB2, text files, COBOL copybooks, or XML.

The Trillium Software System will standardize, cleanse and match data using our proprietary rules engine. You can remove duplicates, ensure that your name and address data will mail properly, CASS certify data and more. It’s a great way to get your data ready for SOA on the mainframe, too.

My hats off to Clara C. on our development team, who heads up the project for maintaining the mainframe version of the Trillium Software System. She’s well-known at Trillium Software for her mainframe acumen and for hosting the annual pot-luck lunch around the holidays. (She makes an excellent mini hot dog in Jack Daniels sauce.)

I’m not sure whether Wally will stick with his mainframe or migrate the whole thing to UNIX servers, but he was happy to know he has an option. With an open data quality platform, like the Trillium Software System, it’s not a huge job to move the whole process from the mainframe to UNIX by leveraging the business rules developed on one platform and copying them to the other.