IBM z Systems Integration Guide for the Mobile and API Economy

Today, organizations engage with customers, business partners, and employees who increasingly use mobile technology as their primary general-purpose computing platform. They have an opportunity to fully embrace this new mobile technology for many types of transactions, including everything from exchanging information to exchanging goods and services, from employee self-service to customer service. This mobile engagement allows organizations to build new insight into the behavior of their customers to better anticipate customer needs and gain a competitive advantage by offering new services.

By extending existing enterprise applications onto a mobile platform you can capitalize on existing investments without the need to develop completely new solutions to support mobile services. Because nearly 70% of all enterprise transactions touch a mainframe, IBM® z Systems™ mainframes have an important role in enabling existing and new mainframes to be easily consumed by mobile applications, for example, through REST APIs. These same APIs can be consumed through other channels and applications, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Many technologies and solutions can be used to enable mobile integration with the mainframe, including web APIs, services, connectors, messaging and so on. The primary goal of this IBM Redpaper™ publication is to help IT architects choose between the many mobile integration architectures and solutions and make the right choice based on the specific requirements of the project.

This paper first outlines some of the business imperatives and challenges. It then reviews the main architecture options and the key considerations for planning mobile integration with the mainframe; it provides guidance for when to use specific solutions. Finally, it documents several mobile integration scenarios to illustrate how these technologies are used in real-world scenarios to build robust solutions.