Connecting Mobile Workloads with Back-end Systems

Mobile brings a new set of criteria to application design. Successful mobile apps are not simply additional UIs on existing back-ends but should be designed as Systems of Engagement from a user flow perspective, user-centric instead of back-end centric. A mobile design for the enterprise must encompass the front end app, multiple layers of connectivity, and middle tiers that possibly aggregate more than one System of Record, where each is possibly revised to enable new access techniques. Security must be a primary design consideration from start to finish. In this presentation we’ll use the IBM MobileFirst Reference Architecture as a model on which we elaborate design principles, highlight considerations, and show how IBM Worklight for on-premises and Bluemix for cloud enable reliable, secure, and flexible mobile applications for   enterprise systems. We’ll focus on zEnterprise as the back end but also cover unique capabilities of Power Systems for the enterprise.OLD: While PC growth has considerably slowed recently, mobile adoption has taken off! There are over 6 billion mobile phones in the world today and over 30% of those are smart phones or tablets fueling the new "App Economy"! Mainframes act as system of record for over 70% of world's transactional data and hence most companies are logically seeing tremendous spikes in demand to serve the mobile channel. Caching does help reduce MIPS usage for read-only mobile workloads, but in this presentation we will demonstrate that it does not pay to build the cache, because costs are twice as much as running the mobile workloads in the existing environment leveraging the newly introduced mobile workload pricing option. Further, we will show that proactively implementing a "push" solution can save more than 50% over a "pull" based solution that causes spikes in consumption due to "sticky finger" users. We will also present a study showing over 60% higher throughput and 10% lower cost achieved by co-locating IBM MobileFirst with the back-end system of record.

Tracks: Middleware and Mobile and Social Networking in the Enterprise