WebSphere Portal Enable for z/OS

In today’s competitive business environment, your company is aligning its business strategies to meet increasing pressures to address customer demand, new market opportunities, and competitive threats more rapidly. You are aligning IT investments to enable scalable, available on demand services to meet this need; however, not all investments are providing originally expected returns. Additionally, rigid IT infrastructures continue to restrict business responsiveness and agility.
Many businesses are deploying a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to simplify and standardize IT infrastructures. As a piece of this, IT is being viewed more now as a strategic component of the overall business strategy. Portals continue to remain at the top of technology spending priorities to enable this environment. To make portal investments pay off, you need succinct project definition aligned to the needs of your IT and business stakeholders. The overall desired result is to deliver an IT infrastructure powered by a portal that will execute tasks efficiently and quickly while leveraging existing assets within your IT infrastructure.

IBM®  WebSphere® Portal Enable for z/OS®, V6.1 is an enterprise portal solution that builds upon a solid foundation of previous releases and provides a much more open environment, both from a Portal Open Standards perspective and by providing tools and capabilities for incorporating Web 2.0 Internet resources. Inherent service-oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities can now be more easily explored within a much broader Web context. Other key areas include improved customization and deployment capability.
WebSphere Portal Enable on System z® is the ideal platform for customers requiring high levels of integration with existing mainframe applications, high quality of service for availability, responsiveness to unpredictable workload levels, security, and disaster recovery, while delivering exceptional end-user experiences to customers, partners, and employees. System z, the leading platform for minimizing power, cooling, floor space, and personnel costs, together with WebSphere Portal, are giving clients creative options to deliver unparalleled performance and flexibility.
Key new WebSphere Portal features

• Enhanced Web 2.0 support enables the creation of much more intuitive, responsive, and participatory business applications – Through an enhanced set of Web 2.0 capabilities in WebSphere Portal, organizations can more quickly deploy rich, responsive, browser-based applications that significantly improve the performance of the browser-based user experience. Customers can take advantage of these new features automatically, without having to rework their standards-based portlets. In addition, new features like Representation State Transfer (REST)-based services, live text tags, and improved Atom and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) consumption support the rapid creation of secure, governed composite application mashups, facilitating an organization’s ability to quickly and cost effectively solve specific business problems.
• Streamlined deployment features support faster time to value – This release of WebSphere Portal delivers enhancements that make the product much easier to configure and deploy. New site management capabilities ease promotion of content between portal environments. As a result, WebSphere Portal is one of the few portals on the market today that is easy to install and deploy, yet still scalable enough for global companies that need to deploy applications that support many thousands of users.

An integrated portal solution can help you realize the following business benefits:

• Cost savings
• Build and deploy applications and services faster
• Consolidate the procurement of hardware and software
• Reduce back-office staff and administration costs
• Operational efficiency and productivity
• Enable internal employees and external partners to communicate through one channel
• Link event-based, cross-functional business processes
• Increase data accuracy; and speed decision making
• Revenue generation
• Provide more cross-selling opportunities to employees
• Leverage the expertise of knowledge experts through enhanced collaboration and learning
• Expand market share and move into new markets
• User satisfaction
• Increase customer retention through enhanced service capabilities
• Improve productivity with easier access to information
• Gain a competitive advantage through superior customer service
• Accelerated application and content deployment
• Enable the quick building of business services
• Easily modify applications to meet changing requirements
• Remotely deploy managed applications for users based upon roles
• Facilitate access of business applications whether the user is connected or disconnected — anytime, anywhere