A key differentiator of Metastorm is its ability to automate and manage both human-centric and system-centric processes.

Most organizations rely on a highly disparate and heterogeneous set of systems. This complex infrastructure is complicated further by the need to accommodate the constant change that results from mergers and acquisitions, government regulations, and emerging standards—the latest being a strong move towards Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The result is an environment that inflicts high costs, inflexibility, business process constraints, and compliance risks on the organization.

The Metastorm Integration Manager (MIM) product family addresses these challenges by helping organizations rapidly and cost effectively integrate and more effectively utilize diverse and often highly distributed business systems and services, databases, file systems, and even the most obscure legacy applications.

While it is a powerful standalone integration solution, MIM’s value is further enhanced by the fact that it is an integrated component in the Metastorm Enterprise™ portfolio and can leverage all of the portfolio’s capabilities – including analysis, advanced modeling, and simulation. MIM combines with other Metastorm solutions to deliver enhanced visibility into end-to-end process activities at the system, data, and human interaction levels.

Whether deployed as part of the Metastorm Enterprise suite or on its own, MIM provides a robust platform for:

• Designing, executing, and monitoring system-based processes
• Web-service enabling existing mainframe and legacy applications and functions
• Enabling high-volume secure Managed File Transfer (MFT)
• Integrating mainframe and legacy systems into new and existing business processes on updated technologies
• Enabling native integration to and system-based process management on IBM CICS systems
• Supporting the move to a SOA
• Assembling multiple application functions and data from various systems
• Providing a framework for new composite application development

This means that users have visibility into and can control even the most minute system tasks within the construct of a business process. MIM also allows users to analyze and simulate improvements to the system elements of the process, as well as the human-centric elements, thus providing a complete view of the process that can be improved at all levels.

Broad Support

MIM provides a rich set of system-to-system modeling, process management, and integration tools which allow for integration to be done with greater speed, efficiency, control, and ongoing agility. In addition, compliance and service quality demands can be more easily met through the cross-system transparency and built-in traceability and auditing capabilities of MIM.

MIM supports integration across a broad range of system and data sources in a multitude of ways:

• MIM for CICS — Designed for customers that require integration with IBM mainframe Customer Information Control System (CICS) environments, MIM for CICS runs natively in CICS and service-enables CICS assets, including LU2/3270, BMS and non-BMS transactions, VSAM data, COMMAREA programs, TSQ/TDQ based interfaces, WebSphere MQ, DB2 tables, stored procedures, and IMS.
• MIM Integration Server – Provides a rich set of system-to-system modeling, process management, and integration tools which allow for real-time integration of distributed applications, services, databases, file systems, and application messages across a broad range of disparate operating systems – capabilities that result in greater speed, efficiency, control, and ongoing agility.
• MIM for MFT – Provides secure, high-speed file transfer capabilities with guaranteed delivery and better performance than FTP. MIM for MFT also provides robust enterprise management, control, auditability and rich exception handling for batch-oriented data movement and data integration initiatives.

Beyond Just Integration

When it comes to SOA, customers can leverage MIM to create services that tie together legacy applications across all major distributed and mainframe operating systems with new solution development for seamless process execution across a variety of platforms and channels. MIM accomplishes this via platform-specific APIs or service adapters. These service adapters act as gateways, connecting to each proprietary system and accessing applications and data at the screen, file, message, and database level.

MIM can transform items like files, databases and legacy applications into XML-based, message-driven services. Disparate services can then be orchestrated into courser grain, higher value business services. These choreographed business services can be utilized by the organization in any number of ways, including being incorporated into higher-level, human-centric business processes. By exposing legacy assets as services and managing the execution of those services in key business processes, MIM offers a service-oriented approach to providing business process integration within the context of the Metastorm BPM® suite.

Finally, MIM provides the foundation for automatically tracking and reporting on a complete audit trail of critical system-based process activities and data transfer both within and across organizations – making it an ideal addition to an IT governance strategy.

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