webMethods has announced a new reseller agreement and strategic partnership with NEON Systems that allows webMethods to extend the webMethods Fabric product suite with NEON's award-winning Shadow RTE mainframe integration technology.

By bringing together best-in-class technology for integrating both mainframe and distributed computing environments within a single offering, enterprises can now more readily and easily incorporate their most critical computing resources within the service-oriented architecture (SOA) enabled by webMethods Fabric.

"The mainframe continues to have a vital role in the IT strategies of many of our customers, and making mainframes and distributed platforms true peers in a SOA offers tremendous benefits," said Kristin Weller Muhlner, executive vice president, Product Development, webMethods Inc. "NEON Systems is the widely recognized leader in standards-based mainframe integration and access. Our partnership with NEON allows us to not only offer transactional support for mainframe environments, but also uniquely enables us to provide rich data and event-level integration as well. Through this approach, both legacy information and functionality can be more easily and fully integrated as Web services within critical workflows and business processes. Enterprises ultimately benefit from the use of a single, SOA-based infrastructure for orchestrating all of their enterprise resources, and the ability to extend our patent-pending business activity monitoring capabilities to mainframe-based applications."

Shadow RTE offers enterprises the ability to access, deploy and leverage critical mainframe resources as Web services via a SOA framework and as real-time events within an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). At the same time, it also enables the use of SQL for direct enterprise access to legacy data with additional transactional support offered for screen-based applications and legacy data. By adding these comprehensive capabilities to webMethods Fabric, enterprises can more easily and effectively integrate critical applications and data from mainframe systems within their business process improvement initiatives.

Through the use of webMethods Fabric to leverage these resources in conjunction with Shadow RTE, users can also secure significantly enhanced operational control. For example, specific processes spanning both distributed and mainframe environments can now be more easily and intuitively modeled and deployed. webMethods Fabric also provides the ability to extend real-time visibility into these end-to-end business processes, enable organizations to improve business responsiveness with its predictive process monitoring capabilities. Users can also take advantage of Servicenet, the Web services infrastructure component of webMethods Fabric, to manage and monitor the performance of mainframe-based Web services in accordance with required service level agreements (SLAs).