Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

IBM has done significant work to allow mainframe based applications to expose and consume web services.  They’ve particularly targeted CICS and languages COBOL, PL/I and C++.  While many vendors (including IBM) offer a variety of tools to provide easy web service bridging, IBM’s CICS efforts offer a direct path without loading and managing additional utilities.  There was concern in the past of the CPU load this added to CICS, but IBM handled those problems over the years with the current edition having good performance with reasonable overhead. While IBM recommends using modern development tools such as their Rational Application Developer for Z/Os (RD for Z) to automatically generate and build the binding and WSDL’s necessary for a service, their CICS command line based utility is probably used by most that do so (this being DFHLS2WS).  With a short series of configuration sessions (and limited options), it will take program information and data areas and generate appropriate

In the past months a number of articles were published about Cloud Computing and taxes.  As a techie, choosing a software vendor on the basis of taxes may not be something considered.  But, depending on the jurisdiction, software purchases can be charged sales taxes, service taxes, or value added taxes.  While one might think ‘rented software’ isn’t a purchase and can’t be charged a sales tax, in some places it may be considered a capital acquisition (and taxes as a sale) while in others it could be charged a valued added tax (which taxes services as well as sales in European countries and Israel) or might be subject to various business taxes (such as a franchise tax in Texas where every company’s data on the Cloud is considered a local franchise and taxes as such.) First an important definition of terms, because almost EVERY “Cloud Computing will be Taxed” article I read got it absolutely WRONG… Cloud Computing – renting computing resources from a remote vendor on the basis o