Where Will Digital Banking Culminate?

By Venugopal B. A.

Digital banking is the latest buzzword among bankers and banking customers these days. Apparently, people are seeking to digitize everything the banking industry has to offer, right from account opening to loan disbursement. The real era of digital banking, where digital does not just mean online banking, is all set to dawn on the face of this planet. Banks, as we know them, could soon disappear.

One of the last links in digitization, and probably the most important since the whole of the financial world is centered on it, would be money itself. Money itself is set to undergo a revolutionary transformation. It could and almost certainly will, get digitized!!

So, what can we expect in a cashless world?

Forget the Change!

For starters, you don’t need change anymore. Can you imagine what this could mean for businesses and their customers alike? Situation Stockholm, a Swedish magazine was able to increase sales 59% by just going cashless. The economy, on the whole, will receive a boost.

The Mobile is your Wallet and your Bank Account

Mobile devices will empower you to pay and be paid, the digital way. Credits and debits take place instantaneously. Instantaneous transfers mean that there is no float created due to delays in settlement. Though it does not affect individuals, it has a huge impact on commercial organizations.

Bye, Bye Black Sheep!

With all debit and credit transactions of even the smallest kind being recorded, there is no way that a policeman can stop you for license-less driving and rip you off for personal gain. No income is untracked and so, no taxes left unpaid. The economy turns pristine and pure. Nobody has to pay for somebody else’s undue gain.

Governments and Banks Exit the Cash Business

Governments will no longer have to print money or even worry about counterfeit currency ruining the economy. Banks employ various manual and automatic means just for the sake of counting cash and reconciling them. One study estimates that European banks could save between Euro 45 billion to Euro 90 billion in overheads related to cash by removing cash from their system.

One World, One Currency – Digital

Digital currency will NOT obey borders. As customers and businesses pay and get paid, national borders will make no difference. Governments cannot sustain national currencies and monetary policy will be dictated more and more by the free market.

Shifting Nature of Crimes

Cash theft, counterfeiting, and corruption – the way they exist today, could soon disappear. Black economy will no longer exist. However, certain other sophisticated criminals could prowl the digital landscape hacking and looting their way to wealth. But, a digital economy offers far more leverages in plugging crime than the current cash based society. For instance, plugging software bugs can forever eliminate theft, while physical theft cannot be eliminated for good.

Whether one likes it or not, the digital economy is all set to arrive and change the world in ways hitherto unheard of. Cards were an innovation in the previous generation. Online payment is the trend today. The next generation could well witness the innovation of universal digital currency.

So far, the greatest advantages of a digital economy, as I think of, have been discussed here. But, what about the disadvantages? Anyone? Please leave your comments. Hope to see you again on this blog spot.

Chronic Care Management in America

By Rajesh B.R.

‘Chronic’ has become a buzz word in US Healthcare, as chronic diseases are increasing rapidly and turning out to be a point of concern. Health conditions like diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular disorders, and cancer, etc. are the most common of all health conditions in the US and are very expensive to manage. According to multiple reports, 70% of deaths occur due to chronic diseases each year. A study reported that the above mentioned chronic diseases with few others like pulmonary conditions, mental illnesses, stroke, and hypertension have a total effect equaling $1.3 trillion on the yearly economy, which is anticipated to increase by 3 times in the coming years.

In the next five years, it is expected that 17 million of the US population will be 65 years old. Aged population is prone to chronic medical conditions and progressively consumes additional healthcare resources, which will account to 75% of the total healthcare spend in the country. Currently, 50% of Americans take at least two prescription drugs and 20% take five or more prescription drugs per day for chronic diseases. Managing chronic healthcare conditions is vital for long term survival of a good healthcare system.

As a preventive measure, the US government has introduced health programs like Community Health, Population Health and started publishing journals as “Preventing Chronic Diseases” to manage chronic health conditions. Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMH) are few of the healthcare delivery models being looked at to stem the flow. These healthcare delivery initiatives are introduced to maintain good health through effective health improvement programs.

Chronic care management is a concatenation of patient centric, preventive and inclusive care services delivered via collaboration between practitioners, patients, and care givers. It is realized that healthcare is local and relies on integrated data that gives the providers tools and information to effectively manage an individual’s care. 

To support the above practices of concatenation, collaboration and bringing it to reality, technology plays a very dynamic role. Integrated web applications and mobile applications are few of the effective solutions, which can pool in patients and healthcare providers under one umbrella to manage effective care coordination. These platforms will act as a medium to educate patients about these chronic diseases and take preventive care.

References:

• National Health Council - http://www.nationalhealthcouncil.org/

Changing Game of Logistics – Drones and Drone Management Platforms

By Thejaswini J

Business enterprises of the present day are rapidly embracing the concept of drones as the most versatile tools, which can carry out a broad array of tasks. The businesses world over engaged in the field of logistics are anticipating the growing need to manage their operations such as product deliveries, warehouse management, stocking, transportation, distribution etc. in a much efficient manner. To speed up and automate the process, investing in drone fleets and drone management platforms seems to be a great approach! 

Impact of Drone Usage

Usage of drones by companies is likely to drastically increase in the upcoming years. The market worldwide runs in billions of dollars and positions drone management platforms to provide drone fleet management services to diverse businesses and organizations that intend to adopt drones. Drone delivery implementation will definitely impact the B2B as well as B2C segments. With time, when the idea is fully functional, concepts such as individual mailboxes being upgraded with dedicated codes can be introduced to facilitate new types of personalized drone deliveries.

What’s in it for Retailers?

Retail giants like Amazon and, tech majors like Google and Facebook have already invested millions of dollars in the drone technology. But, what seems to be the motivation behind these huge investments? Amazon intends to utilize drones to deliver its packages within a few hours of orders placed by customers. Facebook wishes to use drones to facilitate internet access across several remote areas of the globe! And, Google may plan to use drones to deliver its products ordered through their ‘Shopping Express’ online store, and also explore options to make internet accessible through its airborne sky balloons. Other leading logistics players such as FedEX, UPS and DHL are also experimenting with drones for delivery options.

However, there are law enforcements for drone usage. Law departments will themselves be purchasing drones for surveillance! So, here are drones serving exceptional and multifarious purposes. 

Drones and Data

If more and more companies start deploying innumerable drones for various purposes, they will require handling enormous quantum of data generated by these techno-equipment. Some of the data streams that need constant tracking include location data, battery status, delivery confirmation, engine condition, video streams, environmental data, functional aspects, and several other data that should be received by the control tower. This very same data shall in turn be used to update customers through emails, notifications, SMS, etc.

Drone Management Platforms

Top tech titans are investing in millions to build high-tech drone management platforms to manage and control each task executed by a drone, specifically in the commercial sector. Such platforms are designed to provide tools that can logically build complex drone applications and manage these applications as well as drones in real-time. With these platforms, multiple drones that operate in the air or even on water and land can be capably managed. The cloud-based technology enables drone platforms to even communicate with the cloud in order to execute workloads efficiently. Also, the platforms help manufacturers, logistics and transportation companies monitor the consignments of goods anywhere. This helps with cost reduction and increases customer satisfaction. Some of the popular drone management tools include DroneDeploy, Skycatch, fluttrbox, among several others.

To conclude, usage of drones and drone management platforms are comprehensive enterprise-grade solutions that can entirely regulate the activities associated with logistics. Expanding and refining the drone delivery service is becoming the goal of numerous logistics companies in order to ease their workflow systems. One thing is for sure that, implementing the use of drones for wide-ranging purposes is only going to get popular and demanding in the coming years; let’s just say it is becoming a reality of the future!

Secure Texting in Healthcare

By Padma Priya R

Texting (aka SMS) is the easiest way to communicate with patients, providers and staff members when it comes to healthcare. A recent survey has found that 81% of doctors use texting for conveying work related messages. It is mainly used for scheduling appointments, making decisions about treatment options, follow up reminders, and transmitting medical device readings (such as blood pressure and heart beat rate) to a care provider.

SMS (Short Messaging Service) can be sent from a software application to mobiles and also from mobile to mobile over a cellular network.

Unfortunately, text messaging has its own drawbacks in healthcare, as it is not secure and non-compliant with HIPAA privacy regulations because of the following reasons:

• ePHI information can be misused by reading and forwarding to non-intended recipients.
• Information can be open, as it stays unencrypted in the sender’s and receiver’s mobile phones and also in the service provider’s server.
• Exchange of delicate Information between the provider and patient is not updated in the EHR.

With texting becoming prominent due to the increased use of smartphones in healthcare delivery, it was imperative for the industry bodies to establish guidelines that would avoid concerns of non-compliance and provide directions for vendors.

For a message containing PHI (Protected Health Information) being shared via SMS, below are the HIPAA guidelines to be adhered to:

• Mobile devices should be locked to avoid unauthorized access to personal data.
• Messages should be encrypted.
• Encrypted messages shall be decrypted and stored in a network provider’s system, so that any unauthorized person should not be able to access it.
• Business associate agreement with the network providers that facilitates message transmission.

While the regulations specified by HIPAA are comprehensive, healthcare vendors of today face some of the below practical challenges while implementing it:

• Mobile network providers not signing up for HIPAA business associate agreements.
• Reliability of networks transferring messaging securely and ensuring to protect the stored transmitted messages.

With digitalization and mobility becoming a critical part of the entire healthcare delivery service, the industry will have to look at channels to overcome the challenges presented. At the same time, it is also imperative to ensure security requirements are not compromised upon.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)

By Harpreet Dhillon

Introduction 

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) offers a new way to design and manage networking services. Although a lot of innovations are made in the networking field, but still there is a dependency on proprietary hardware appliances to cater to the networking needs. NFV eliminates this dependency by offloading network functionality to the software which runs in a virtual environment. It is all about implementing network functions in the software that today runs on proprietary hardware, leveraging high-volume standard servers and IT virtualization. NFV helps you move away from multiple vendor networks, customized network devices and complex operations. 

Challenges in current infrastructure:

• Lack of flexibility and agility: Current network infrastructure does not provide any flexibility, so the network resources cannot be moved anywhere in the network. 
• Complexity: Network is becoming more complex due to a large and increasing variety of proprietary hardware appliances by various network vendors. 
• Manual-efforts oriented: Installation and configuration for network appliances are complex, manually intensive and time-consuming tasks.
• Network endpoint mobility: Today’s world of virtualization demands device mobility across the network. The current physical appliances are typically provisioned once in their lifetime. They stay fixed in the same network location and don’t support any kind of flexibility.

Benefits of NFV

• Reduce capex: NFV reduces the demand for purpose-built hardware as it decouples the device functionality from hardware. This certainly decreases the capex investments which are required to purchase hardware.
• Reduce opex: It brings most of the networking functionalities on to the virtual platform instead of hardware. This results in reduction of power and cooling expenses which are installed for proprietary hardware, thus reducing opex costs.
• Flexibility: NFV easily, rapidly, dynamically provisions and instantiates new services in various locations. 
• Improved operational efficiency: Multiple-vendor environment brings complexities in the network which could result in downtime. NFV brings all networking functionalities on to a single platform which can certainly reduce complexities and improve operational efficiency.
• Scalability: It brings scalability to the network environment where customers can accommodate their changing business requirements in the existing network without making investments in proprietary hardware.
• Reduces IT staff cost: NFV results in IT staff resource saving due to a fully automated functionality and troubleshooting from centralized location.

Conclusion

The NFV technology is best suited to the service providers’ industry for whom it can drive down complexity and cost as well as increase agility. This technology can force major network equipment manufacturers to consider offering virtualized versions of their products instead of the proprietary hardware.

React Native – Best of Both Worlds?

By Dheeraj V.S.
 

Using hybrid technologies for mobile app development has always been a tantalizing choice. There are primarily two types of hybrid frameworks – those such as Apache Cordova and Adobe PhoneGap rely on the native WebView for running application code. Others such as Titanium and Xamarin have their own runtimes that bridge to native-land.

While the promise of ‘write-once run-anywhere’ that these hybrid technologies offer is definitely alluring, they have never been able to approach the performance that a native code can bring. Performance might not be a critical factor for some applications. However, with the increasing adoption of fluid user interfaces such as material design, users would come to expect the same experience with hybrid apps. That is where traditional hybrid apps run short. Facebook found this the hard way and moved back to native technologies when they released their Facebook 5.0 iOS app. The native app performed twice as fast in many areas compared to the older hybrid versions.

So, it might come as a surprise (or perhaps not!) that a new kind of hybrid technology should emerge from the stables of Facebook. It is called as React Native and has been open-sourced just last week. It employs the architectural principles of Facebook's React JavaScript library, while leveraging native user interfaces.

React Native is built with performance in mind. It is different from other types of hybrid technologies that, it generates the layout of the user interface on a separate thread. This allows the main thread to be responsive to the user input and free to perform fluid animations. Whenever there is a change in the UI, React achieves a complete layout, computes the differences with the current layout and sends only the changes over to the main thread for rendering.

React Native uses native UI widgets and expects the user-interface code to be developed separately for each target platform. An overlooked advantage that hybrid technologies bring is having a common development team for multiple platforms. With React Native, the same development team can be engaged for development on both iOS and Android. This has been touted as "learn once, write anywhere".

As mobile apps are becoming increasingly complex, managing code complexity is a major concern for hybrid developers. This need has seen the rise of MV* frameworks such as AngularJS being adapted for hybrid app development (Ionic framework and OnsenUI come to mind). React was born out of this necessity. It is a completely fresh look into how Web applications are architected, where once accepted "best practices" are re-examined and discarded. Does this mean that React Native is the panacea that mobile developers are waiting for? Definitely not. With React Native, the user interface code still needs to be platform-specific, requiring maintenance of separate code bases. With the plethora of technology choices that are now available for mobile app development, it is important to understand the business requirements and weigh in the pros and cons prior to committing to a new technology stack.

Neo Banking - the New Age Banking

By Raghavendra Prasad R

Mobile banking has led to a simpler and unique medium for banking, known as Neo Banking or virtual/online banking, which is more suitable for tech savvy customers. These types of banking locations are just a click away as there are no brick and mortar locations. Such banks are seemingly for people who do not intend to personally visit the branches. Neo banking is one of the latest trends in the banking industry. There are currently only 4 such banks in the US.

Neo banking has a lot of scope due to several factors like increase in tech savvy customers & millennials and high penetration rate of smart devices. Neo banks are low cost structured, real time balancing and, some neo bank apps have a unique feature of budgeting or money tracking. So, it suggests you to buy or not to buy a certain product depending upon a customer's budget, and simplicity of user friendly apps.

Advantages of Neo Banking

• Making online transactions simpler: The customers do not have to visit the branch at all and can carry out most of the transactions online, be it over a tab or on their mobiles. Imagine a small business owner having to deal with the traffic during peak hours to visit a bank to conduct a transaction only to find a lengthy queue, which could take up a lot of his time that can be put to good use if he were at his location. Online banking can be executed only with an internet connection even while the customer is travelling.
• Speed of transferring funds: Fund transfer speed is another aspect with online banking that cannot be matched if you were to deposit a check or a draft into your own account or someone else's account. If you were expecting a payment or if you were to pay for an invoice, what better way to pay than transfer online? For one, you are saving paper and you are also transferring funds at a much faster rate and can do anytime-anywhere as long as you have a smart device with a network connection.
• No overhead costs: As these banks do not maintain a physical location, they do not incur any overhead costs. This allows these banks to pass on the benefits to their customers in terms of better interest rates on savings and lower interest rate on loans or mortgage compared to physical branches.​

Neo banks are investing highly in technology and are also providing licenses to use mobile apps to regular and other such banks. For e.g. a neo bank called Moven has lent its technology to Westpac bank for two years.

One of the main drawbacks of neo banking is that it does not support complex transactions not supported by mobile banking. For instance, if a customer has to carry out a transaction of a considerable amount, which is not possible through mobile banking, he/she visits the branch to perform the transaction. But, in case of neo banking, it is not possible as there is no branch, so they have to face the inconvenience of transferring money to any other account in one of the physical branches, which could also take time causing delays in their transaction. As neo banks are mainly online banks, some of the concerns that they face may include:

• Virus and malware attacks on smart devices: Zeus Trojan is a virus, which steals the authentication details like card or pin numbers.
• Wireless network risk: Mobile banking is done through wireless networks, which is risky if it is an open network as there are high chances of hacking used to steal information.
• Authentication issue: If banks have not adopted new technologies like two factor authentication and are still using old systems of authentication of using a PIN or password, it is much more prone to hacking to steal sensitive information.​

One of the ways to overcome is to ensure that the latest technology in security is adopted by banks like biometrics (voice recognition or finger print authentication) to minimize any such risks.

All in all, online banks are here to stay and are already proving to be disrupting the way the banking is done as known to mankind. It is a healthy competition to the regular banks as they are already sitting up and taking notice of these banks and are trying to brainstorm ways on preserving their customer base from being poached by these banks. Only the future will tell how these will fare compared to the regular banks. Until then, it is the customer who is left to choose from among these different banking models.

Modern Day Community Delivery Services

By Mahesh D

The most challenging sectors in the retail industry are order fulfillment and delivery strategies that can be collectively segregated as "logistics". Retailers are facing challenges with the current market conditions, the increased presence of online shopping, shrinking of fiscal measures by banks, and the escalation of operational costs such as transportation and rent. All these factors act as obstructions to the growth of the retail sector. As retailers are committed to delivering as per their estimated delivery date, most of them manage the logistics and bringing back the delivery boxes in stock.Making individual delivery to customers is an expensive proposition. A study reveals that delivery for each individual it may cost up to $13-15, whereas, the customer is charged between $5-7, which means the remaining cost is borne by the retailer.

In order to tackle the delivery problems, retailers have come up with multiple solutions that are being tried out. For instance, few retailers have set-up local satellite collection centers from where customers can collect their orders at their convenience. A few other retailers have opted to use national posts to deliver all of its customer's orders for the next day.

Customers are now looking forward for the last mile delivery in an innovative way, such as community delivery or secure crowd-sourced delivery. Retailers can actually increase the trust of customers who travel from station to station "or" city to city by enabling hassle free and smooth operation. With managers stationed at airports or railway stations to hand over and pick-up packages from customers, the platform has its definitive purpose.

How does Community Delivery take place?

1.  A community member thinks of visiting a store:

• Broadcasts store visit plan to community
• Proceeds to store
• Shops for self
• Receives QR Code on mobile from the 2nd community member - "Online Shopper"
• Flash QR Code at store
• Collect items
• Handover items to fellow community member

2.  A community member receives message

• Shops online
• Makes payment and receives QR Code
• The purchase is notified to the store
• Sends QR Code to the shop goer

Advantages of Community Delivery

Retailer benefits:

• Increases shopping conversions
• Reduced investment and increased ROI
• Increased security
• Instant updates across all POS

​Customer benefits:

• Allow customers to get help immediately from a community member who broadcasted store visit plan to community
• Reduced time in traveling / queue at POS
• Allows customers to select the essential items required, which helps the community member to carry the bags as per the broadcasts
• Access to product information / suggestions

​Procedure Flow of Community Delivery

As more and more retail partners start enabling integration, like payment partners, banks, technology partners, Community Delivery will be used increasingly in retail as well. It has become so popular that all the brick and mortar retailers are implementing Community Delivery along with the traditional method of "Pick 'n' Shop".

Features of Community Delivery

• Shop for items
• Post for community shopping
• Receive acceptance message
• Generate QR Code
• Send QR code to community shopper
• Display QR code at shop to collect items

Community Delivery indeed looks to be the future of delivery. More and more industries are finding that community delivery is the right pitch for their particular need.

The progress of community delivery will continue from the original "E-commerce" to the current "Point of Sale". It might not take over from traditional "Pick 'n' Shop", but rather, it will grow to accompany traditional "Pick 'n' Shop".

SPINE and LEAF Architecture

​By Harpreet Dillon

Datacenter networks have been rapidly evolving in the recent years due to heavy workloads. Unlike traditional enterprises, the modern datacenters demand a very high network throughput to cater to heavy workload needs. Hence, network latency and throughput are extremely important for application performance, while packet loss is completely unacceptable.

In modern datacenters, an alternative to the traditional network topology has emerged, which is known as SPINE & LEAF. This architecture is designed to provide very scalable throughput in a uniform and predictable manner, across all connected servers. This architecture has two main components, SPINE switches and LEAF switches. The spine is composed of high-throughput Layer 3 switches with high port density and leaf switches are the same as access layer, which provide network connection points for servers. This architecture has proven to deliver the high bandwidth, low-latency, non-blocking server-to-server connectivity that is required for a massively scalable datacenter. SPINE & LEAF architecture uses Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (Trill) and Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) technologies to provide loop-free path to the connected hosts.

Fig: Architecture Drawing

Challenges in Current Infrastructure

• Network downtime: The traditional network faces downtime issues due to loops, which are caused by the current three-tier architecture model.
• Under-utilization of resources: The network resources are not fully used due to technology constraints.
• Latency: The traditional network faces latency issues as it cannot generate desired throughput, which can certainly cause business loss.

Business Benefits of SPINE & LEAF Architecture

• Optimal utilization of resources: SPINE & LEAF architecture provides an opportunity to fully utilize all network resources through various non-blocking & loop-free techniques.
• Operational efficiency: This architecture provides high bandwidth & low latency, which improves network performance and brings efficiency in the network.
• Reduced network congestion: SPINE & LEAF architecture reduces network congestion through shared buffer-switching platform for leaf node.
• Lower power consumption: This architecture uses multiple 10G optics instead of single 40G optics, which decreases the power consumption. The power consumption of 40G optics is ten times more than that of 10G optics.

​​Conclusion

The SPINE & LEAF architecture is an evolution of traditional datacenter to address the rapidly emerging network requirement. SPINE & LEAF architecture is best suited for cloud service providers or large enterprises, which runs very critical business applications and demands high network performance, high network bandwidth availability, loop-free environment and low latency in the network.

Internet of Things (IoT) Effect on Logistics

By P Sreenivasa Gopal 

Hyper connectivity is something that connects persons and things - anytime, anywhere. This will have an impact on our social, political and economic consequence and plays a major part in our day-to-day lives. This hyper connectivity is also known as IoT (Internet of Things), the new buzz word in the industry.

Logistics Ecosystem

Visibility in transit is one of the key problem areas in logistics. The logistics ecosystem has various players. Products are handled and moved between manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, retailers and customers. IoT, with cloud based GPS, helps in tracking items and their statuses. This technology uses RFID chips to communicate with each other. Chips will be attached to items and using this, items can send information like their identity, their location, temperature, pressure etc. This also prevents goods from getting damaged as chips can send out information in case of bad weather conditions like varying temperature and humidity or traffic conditions, driver specific data like (driving patterns, average speed, etc.) during transit.

Data gathered and stored from GPS and RFID based technologies helps professionals to automate shipping and delivery process by predicting the exact time of arrival. Combination of real-time sensor data with environmental data will provide higher order of intelligence to all the relevant stakeholders. This allows the stakeholders to make efficient decisions to improve the overall productivity.

​For example, providing information about traffic jam and the potential delay before starting of the trip has much higher value than receiving an alert if stuck in traffic due to roadblock.

​IoT can help in the vehicle preventive maintenance aspect as well. If equipment can by themselves self-diagnose a potential problem, the problem can be solved much before it fails. IoT can include different elements in logistics, which are connected and having intelligence as given below:

1. Vehicles - play a key role in logistics ex: - truck, planes and ships
2. Sites - vehicles pass through many of these sites during their journey
3. Roads - intelligence is started to build into roadways, railways, etc.

IoT helps the logistics industry by many ways given below:

1. Reducing the asset loss by knowing and resolving issues in time
2. Efficient routing and saving of fuel cost
3. Monitor and maintenance of temperature in transit for perishable food items
4. Monitoring and tracking of inventory; reduce out-of-stock situations
5. Improve fleet efficiencies by reducing redundancies

Conclusion

With IoT, exchange of information is seamless between various stakeholders in the supply chain. Also, this helps the users to be proactive and take preventive measures.

Web Technology on IBM iSeries

By Bramhananda Reddy

During the 1980s, there were several small and medium sized companies operating in all the major domains. There was a need for a machine that was not as large and as expensive as that of Mainframe and at the same time, the new machine was to be easy to install/use without compromising on the performance and security. IBM observed this need and introduced a new family of machines - System/400. Today, legacy technology can be broadly classified in System Z and System I. System Z (or zSeries) stands for Mainframe system and System I (or iSeries) stands for AS/400 system. Reason for this nomenclature is – Z stands for Zero down time and I for integrated.

In the earlier blog "Mainframe Communicates with the Outside World", we discussed the modernization technique for System Z. In this blog, we will explore the modernization technique for the iSeries system.

Current Trend

Since the launch of IBM iSeries machines, this midrange computer has been very successful and used by small/intermediate size companies for their business processing. In 1988 alone, IBM was able to sell 250,000 systems worldwide, making it the most preferred midrange computer. As the industry started moving towards digitization, it created a wave of serious road blocks for iSeries application owners.

• Character based screen meant that traditional iSeries application could not offer a better user experience
• Applications had to be accessed only through workstations with a 5250 emulator

With these many issues, migration of an application on the iSeries seems to be best approach. However, this comes with high risk, cost and time. So what is the next solution?

The next best solution would be to take the existing application and host it as a web application. The new iSeries machines are loaded with the following features -

• Capability to run TCP/IP and web server with the help of ILE (Integrated Language Environment) and IFS files (Integrated File System)
• Users can run all the up-to-date web technologies and programming languages like PHP, Java, Apache HTTP services and web frameworks

The big question - "How can we change the existing iSeries application to web application?"

One of the ways to succeed in this endeavor is by using CGI (Common Gateway Interface) Development tool kit. CGI tool kit is an open source software that can be downloaded from www.easy400.net. The tool is constantly revised and re-published as per the need. The CGI standard establishes the way a program should be invoked from a remote web browser, and is fully supported by iSeries. There are two kits available –

• CGIDEV2 for RPG language
• CGICBLDEV2 for COBOL language

Tool kits can be downloaded and installed on the iSeries and subroutines can be easily called from the host language.

The following diagram depicts an architectural implementation of a web application on IBM iSeries with help of CGI Tools.

​​User sends the request through browser with respective port number to IBM iSeries. With the help of TCP/IP and HTTP API, IBM iSeries receives this request and sends the associated HTML to the browser. At the same time, RPG/COBOL program gets activated and waits for the user response through a browser. Once this user response is received, the data is processed by the corresponding COBOL/RPG program.

Conversion Samples

The below snapshot demonstrates vanilla conversion of iSeries onto the web. In this example, two screens from iSeries are converted and displayed as a single screen on the browser. Apart from this, we can also include graphics and features that can make the webpage more attractive and user friendly.

Benefits:

Time to market

• Existing iSeries application can be quickly converted to a web application

Development cost

• CGI tool kit is an open source software
• By enabling the HTTP services on iSeries, the same machine can also work as a HTTP server

Low risk

• Since the business rules are untouched, the risk is greatly reduced
• Changes done are only related on how the data is received and sent from programs

User experience

• Enhanced user experience
• Applications can be accessed from several devices

Conclusion

Based on the above discussion, we can say that the CGI tool kit is a handy software, wherein web applications can be developed and deployed on a rapid scale with minimal risk.