Software AG announced that its transactional database Adabas, its business application development environment Natural, its legacy integration tool EntireX Communicator and supporting products have been successfully tested on the new IBM System z9 mainframe and flagship operating system, z/OS version 1.7. Software AG customers’ mission-critical databases and applications can benefit from the increased system availability, security and encryption capabilities of the System z9 mainframe.

"IBM’s System z9 is designed to help customers manage such complex issues as data security and federal regulation compliance," said Joe Gentry (pictured), Vice President, Enterprise Transaction Systems, Software AG. "By working together to fully support the System z9 within weeks of its availability, Software AG and IBM demonstrate their commitment to providing full customer service and enabling organizations to protect their mission-critical systems."

The System z9 mainframe - the first of a new generation of mainframes designed to help facilitate management of security and systems resources across a corporate IT network - began shipping to IBM customers in September 2005. Designed to help detect and deter intrusion, the System z9, working with z/OS, IBM's flagship mainframe operating system, is a security-rich computing system.

Among the Software AG products tested are:

ADABAS: Software AG’s advanced database management system specifically designed to support thousands of users in parallel while giving sub-second response times. ADABAS currently supports the high performance online transaction processing (OLTP) applications of 3,000 organizations with exceptional requirements in data volume, data complexity, response time and throughput.

NATURAL: Software AG's application development and deployment platform for enterprise business applications. It cuts development and maintenance costs by automating code development, builds new applications and services for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) quickly and easily and provides interoperability with Java and .Net while also enabling users to build rich internet applications.

EntireX Communicator: Part of Software AG’s Enterprise Legacy Integrator offering used by customers worldwide for business critical integration solutions. EntireX Communicator enables developers to open existing enterprise mainframe applications (COBOL/3GL or Natural) by encapsulating valuable programming logic and transactions into ready-to-use .NET, J2EE or Web services. As this is a bi-directional communication solution, Natural and COBOL/3GL legacy applications can also consume .NET, J2EE or Web services transparently as if they were local subprograms.

 "This news demonstrates that Software AG is committed to ensuring their core products- are compatible with the latest class of mainframes." said Terri Virnig, vice president, IBM System z9. "There is growing interest from organizations around the world about what the new generation of mainframes – running Linux, Java and SOA—can do."