Introduction to Host-Initiated Processing
This section features an example of communication between a central data center and multiple branch offices. It shows how the Host-Initiated Processing (HIP) feature of Microsoft® Host Integration Server 2004 enables such communication.
An important goal of a successful enterprise organization is to reduce costs and increase profitability. One approach to achieving this goal is to improve operating efficiency and streamline the production process. A common obstacle to achieving this goal is the cost of integrating legacy data-storage systems with newer desktop systems often used at remote sites.
A typical enterprise organization might run its daily operations using mission-critical applications composed of customized COBOL programs running in an IBM MVS environment either as scheduled batch jobs or as online programs in CICS and IMS transaction programs. Such an organization faces the challenge of bringing data from external sources into the legacy batch processing flow without disrupting predefined automated processing schedules.
These external sources are likely to be based on new Windows®-based computing solutions—for example Microsoft SQL Server™ and Microsoft BizTalk® Server—that offer qualities such as performance, scalability, and reliability. Taking advantage of emerging Windows-based technologies and integrating them with legacy business processes can be daunting for most IT departments, because the organization must invest in costly and complex development programs to build applications to achieve that integration.
Microsoft Host Integration Server 2004 offers a variety of tools that help you effectively and rapidly implement new integration solutions. The Host-Initiated Processing (HIP) feature enables you to build applications that integrate resources like SQL Server databases, BizTalk orchestration schedules, BizTalk messaging, and Microsoft Exchange Server with enterprise application processes that drive data acquisition from those Windows-based resources.
HIP is composed of three core features:
- Transaction Integrator Designer. You use Transaction Integrator Designer to build and deploy integrated business processes that are initiated from IBM legacy batch processing jobs or CICS and IMS transaction manager environments so that they can easily and seamlessly access services and resources in the Microsoft Windows environment (for example, COM+, the NET Framework, BizTalk Server).
- Transaction Integrator Manager. You use Transaction Integrator Manager to configure endpoints, associate resources with requests, and define security and access rules. With TI Manager, you can easily integrate IBM client application programs and Windows services and resources.
- HIP Service. The HIP Service is a run-time service that manages the Windows communications endpoint for accepting requests from programs in an IBM environment, presenting the requests to a Windows resource, and returning the resulting information from the resource to the requesting IBM application program.
The example presented in this section shows how you can use HIP to integrate processes between legacy and Windows-based applications.
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