iWay Helps Harris Corporation Build for the Future

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	Jorosylan Williams, Senior DBA and Software Engineer, Harris Data Management Services Group

Harris Corporation of Melbourne, Florida is a long-time user of Information Builders' technology. The global supplier of communications products and services originally acquired mainframe FOCUS and has continued to rely on Information Builders solutions to meet new needs, such as metadata-based management of legacy data stores. Jorosylan Williams, the senior DBA and software engineer of Harris' Data Management Services Group, gives Information Builders Magazine this update since our last interview with her in 1999.

IB MAGAZINE - Thank you for taking the time to discuss how Harris Corporation is using iWay Software products, Jorosylan. How long have you and Harris been Information Builders customers?
WILLIAMS - Harris Corporation started running FOCUS on an IBM mainframe in October 1980. And I've been using your products since I joined Harris in 1981.

IB MAGAZINE - How have things changed over the years and which of our products are you using now?
WILLIAMS - Well, our mainframe is gone. But you helped Harris to move off the mainframe and preserve our investment in legacy data. We presently use WebFOCUS Copy Manager and WebFOCUS Managed Reporting Environment (MRE). Harris used Copy Manager to migrate legacy data from MVS to flat files on UNIX, and WebFOCUS MRE for reporting on the data.

IB MAGAZINE - Which iWay products have you acquired?
WILLIAMS - We recently acquired the new iWay ETL Manager 5.1, iWay Metadata Manager, and Data Management Console to manage and audit our legacy data stores.

IB MAGAZINE - How are you using iWay technologies?
WILLIAMS - We just installed the iWay ETL tools on a Microsoft NT 4 Server running MS-SQL Server – except for some minor issues, we had no problems with the new structure of iWay's product suite. We'll be using this system as a data archival and retrieval repository for the legacy data we migrated from our old mainframe and onto UNIX. Our first project involves building data catalogs of this old mainframe data, so it can be managed and audited with iWay Metadata Manager.

IB MAGAZINE - How do you like iWay's new products?
WILLIAMS - I really like the GUI – the look and feel of the iWay Catalog Manager product makes it easier to navigate our data catalogs. I also really like iWay's data transformation products. They make my job a lot easier and minimize the amount of time needed for conversions and saving data in the formats we need.

IB MAGAZINE - How do you view the transformation of EDA middleware into iWay's broker-based architecture?
WILLIAMS - So far we feel the iWay infrastructure represents a major improvement over EDA, which we tried when it first came out.

IB MAGAZINE - Can you share any of your future plans for iWay technology?
WILLIAMS - Looking ahead, we're considering using iWay Read Adapters for PeopleSoft and Informix to further integrate current application data with our new legacy data repositories and data catalogs.

IB MAGAZINE - Jorosylan, thanks again for sharing your experiences with us. We look forward to hearing of Harris' future projects using iWay tools.