UltraQuest Applications extends the UltraQuest product to provide all the application development capabilities of RP/Web. This allows you to build custom reporting environments and other applications.
Corporate intranets have quickly become one of the most vital components of a successful business infrastructure. To remain competitive, you have to take advantage of Web technology. Yet, even as intranet technology matures, more and more IS professionals are finding that many of the basic challenges still remain.
You’ve been here before. Business units need local, decentralized, departmental systems to maximize productivity. Budgets are limited and evolving technologies are often unproven. The expense of moving mainframe applications or data to other platforms can be prohibitive, and may not even make sense. After all, most mission-critical applications remain on the mainframe because only that platform can provide the reliability, security, and computing power needed to make them effective.
If these are the issues you're facing now, you'll find UltraQuest to be the blend of power, efficiency, dependability, and versatility you need.
UltraQuest's architecture and features allow you to make the best use of existing mainframe resources, rapidly customize implementations to respond to major business initiatives, and ensure that you get increased value as you scale up or redevelop in the future. No matter what your criteria, UltraQuest is the shortest path to success.
The expense of corporate intranets can sneak up on you. Small, departmental solutions can often “fly below radar,” but soon they become popular and require integration with other systems. As an enterprise-wide solution, UltraQuest saves the cost of multiple departmental implementations. Instead of needing a cadre of tools, you can buy one tool that “plays well with others,” for everyone to use, eliminating the need to integrate multiple solutions.
UltraQuest is one of the best long-term investments you can make. Unlike three-tiered solutions, no additional expenditures are required to get an application up and running, and no additional purchases are required to scale your systems upward.
UltraQuest completely eliminates the need for 3270 transactions, significantly reducing the CPU costs of existing applications. It’s a savings not possible under screen-scraping approaches. And it’s a proposition to consider if you’re going to scale up, or if your mainframe is already nearing capacity. Additionally, UltraQuest’s unique DSF architecture ensures that additional CPU resources are not wasted every time a CGI is run. If you’re considering approaches that translate “business rules”, you’ll find UltraQuest simple and more powerful on top of reducing costs.
Worried about the incidental costs from implementing all this new technology? With UltraQuest you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It allows you to leverage your existing mainframe expertise right now, while exploring these new technologies. This reduces the incidental costs of retraining and staff downtime while easing the task of transitioning to a new environment. Other solutions may run out of steam and need to be replaced down the road, but UltraQuest is flexible enough to handle simple “chroming” operations now, and full-fledged application development and integration in the future.
UltraQuest is simple to install, use, and maintain. You only have to install a single set of software on a single platform, no matter how many different ways you plan to use it. It’s the simplest configuration possible and can be done without sacrificing power or scalability.
One of the reasons most mission-critical applications still reside on the mainframe is that the mainframe delivers where other platforms fall short. Scaling a three-tiered application to include several thousand additional users can be a long, time-consuming, and expensive process. With UltraQuest, it’s no problem. By leveraging your intranet, you can easily scale to tens of thousands of users, with no additional purchases or manpower required.
In addition, the UltraQuest scripting and application development environment incorporates Select Business Solutions’ 4GL, providing you with a powerful, time-tested, proven engine to access data.
You can construct everything from simple scripts to major applications in less time and with less code than with any other mainframe solution. You can access data using SQL, or leverage robust interfaces to many data sources – VSAM, DB2, IMS, IDMS, etc. – using one standard syntax with more power and functionality than SQL would give you by itself.
UltraQuest’s Durable Server Facility (DSF) architecture allows you to easily segregate and control access to individual Web applications, even though all of them may go through the same logical server.
One of the inherent advantages of the mainframe is its unparalleled security. Still, it can be tricky to tie your mainframe to the corporate intranet without compromising your existing controls. UltraQuest reinforces the power of mainframe security, while simplifying its application. UltraQuest isolates the back-end CGI processing from the Web server, allowing for additional security and protecting the server from CGI failure.
You can apply all the familiar mainframe security controls to any back-end process and group your CGIs according to the types of resources and security controls they need, independent of the server. Multiple types of security can easily be applied to groups of UltraQuest CGIs, all organized for ease of maintenance.
UltraQuest allows you to construct custom modules for interfacing to any client or middleware tools that can communicate with a Web server.
UltraQuest is available on both z/VM and z/OS. It works with Select’s ICOM web server on z/OS and Velocity’s zVWS web server on z/VM.
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