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Amplify your enterprise with IMS TM

  
When you start to look closer at how IMS plays a role in the hybrid cloud, it is crystal clear that IMS already is a strong presence and player in this landscape. Consisting of two primary products in the IMS portfolio, IMS Transaction Manager and IMS Database, our products are positioned at the center of the transactional data flow with REST enabled interfaces allowing for clear data flow both incoming and outgoing.

Specially, IMS Transaction Manager sits right in the middle of the action, taking in the transactions from both on premise and cloud applications and interacting with the database, including both DB2® and, for a more optimized experience, IMS Database.


With IMS TM at the forefront of the hybrid cloud landscape for transactional data, many surrounding tools can be leveraged including Ansible® and Openshift® through digitally transformed ways of working, developing and updating those critical data driven applications.

Applications can both be deployed net new or, as we see quite often now, modernized in place, updating parts or all of the applications, reducing risk and eliminating the need to shift an application.

Now as we analyze how the enterprise data transactional flow occurs from a high level snapshot, there are multiple opportunities to exploit your already deployed  IMS application platform.

IMS has truly been a transactional workhorse through the years, managing billions of transactions per day flowing through our powerful application platform, IMS TM, and connecting to IMS DB or other enterprise grade databases.

In the public cloud, your enterprise should be leveraging teams internally beyond your mainframe organization to take deeper advantage of the highly valuable IMS TM fronted data. Multiple types of applications can be deployed out in the public cloud and by leveraging the integral z/OS® Connect product, those applications, which are likely delivering a valuable, enhanced, killer experience for your clients, can now include the IMS data which enhances those applications. Those development teams can leverage pure IMS TM fronted data and reality is, they don’t necessarily need mainframe skills to do this.

Shifting focus to the private cloud, many enterprises have large scale applications handling a wide variety of data handling. With both IMS TM and IMS DB, you can extend the value of IMS data by integrating with these enterprise applications. For example, IMS data could be extended into the popular logging application Splunk® and be able to understand IMS data in different ways. Another example would be for IMS data to participate in the latest trend known as Data Fabric where the IMS data can be visualized and leveraged alongside other critical enterprise data to produce strategic views maybe not seen in the past.

In addition to the transactional data flow, IMS comes with the powerful automation and development capability as well. The Ansible® for IBM Z® product which is founded on the wildly popular Red Hat®Ansible® automation platform, offers an increasingly wide spectrum of use cases, capabilities and tools to completely automate so many facets of the IMS product. Typical use cases include DBRC management, IMS Catalog management, configuration management and, really, with the ability to elicit commands, any use case can be met, scripted and automated in an Ansible playbook.

Dive deeper and learn more about how IMS TM can amplify your enterprise at http://www.ibm.com/products/ims.

Don't forget to visit IMS Central to find more IMS training content, what's new, and links to documentation and support.