Service Levels, Options Increase Despite Doubling in Site Visits
ATLANTA, Oct. 29, 2007 – GT Software, a leading provider of rapid SOA development solutions that leverage mainframe resources, today announced that racing organizer France Galop has gone “live” with a multi-purpose, SOA-enabled website based on the company’s renowned Ivory Service Architect. Launched in June 2007 and now proven in months of actual use,
www.france-galop.com is aimed at disparate audiences, including professionals, racing enthusiasts and novices, and offers a highly intuitive approach to the world of horse racing.
A dominant force in the promotion of horse racing across the nation, Paris-based France Galop creates and implements the official Racing Code, issues permits for racing, training and riding, approves the horse racing calendar, and manages six race tracks.
The number of visitors to the France Galop site doubled in 2006, with more than four million visitors and over 95 million hits. In view of this growth, France Galop needed a graphical, functional and technical transformation so as to offer professionals an effective tool and to provide a greater wealth of information for the general public.
With a team of 13 computer specialists, DSI France Galop has used a successive range of technologies, such as Minitel, large systems and mainframe DB2, to manage its database of horses registered on the professional circuit, as well as races held across France. Prior to the launch of its new website, the company consulted information systems group Sopra, and selected the Ivory SOA tool, published by GT Software and distributed in France by JVL.
Among the important challenges solved by Ivory, France Galop succeeded in leveraging its mainframe-based DB2 and evolving its other systems into a more robust and highly functional SOA. Plus, they avoided rewriting any of the data sources or applications programs. Specifically, the company enabled all of the data from the MVS (COBOL – CICS –DB2) applications to reside on the mainframe in their native formats.
“Prior to making any decision regarding a solution for this project, we recognized the importance of maintaining the technical and business process knowledge,” commented Jacki Durand, the primary lead for the Ivory implementation. “This was a top priority when evaluating technology vendors.”
Ivory Service Architect is the centerpiece of the Ivory mainframe SOA solution, turning mainframe developers into service developers for rapid mainframe SOA development. Ivory Service Architect consists of a graphical modeling environment; and a SOAP processor with runtime service orchestration and WSDL repository.
After analyzing the company’s technology topologies that were identified during due diligence, GT Software’s Ivory was installed on the application server (hosted by the mainframe) that published web services for the website portal usage; defining the COBOL applications entailed more than 80 Web services. Additionally, France Galop was able to develop programs and publish Web services that would provide information like race results and facilitate more efficient searches like horse names listed by trainer.
