Treehouse Software Partners with Stone Bond Technologies to offer comprehensive enterprise Data Virtualization

Press Contacts: Joe Brady (+1.724.759.7070 x110; jbrady@treehouse.com); Irma Barrientos (+1 713.300.8882; ibarrientos@stonebond.com)

Pittsburgh, PA; Houston, TX, November 17, 2016. ­ Treehouse Software, Inc., of Sewickley, PA and Stone Bond Technologies, L.P. of Houston, TX today announced a partnership to bring agile integration and data virtualization capabilities to every enterprise. Now mainframe data sources can be combined into virtual schemata with relational databases, ERP data, Cloud sources and social media by combining Stone Bond’s Enterprise Enabler® with Treehouse’s tcACCESS.

Since the mid-1990s, Treehouse has been a global leader in mainframe data migration, replication and integration, offering robust and flexible solutions for ETL, CDC and real-time, multidirectional replication between databases on various platforms. With Enterprise Enabler, Treehouse customers benefit from a single platform for enterprise and Cloud integration to deliver integration projects with up to 90% time savings over other solutions.

Treehouse will provide worldwide product sales, marketing and support for Enterprise Enabler, bringing leading-edge integration capabilities to its hundreds of existing customers and to new customers pursuing initiatives such as Agile BI, Master Data Management, Logical Data Warehouses and Web Services.

One of the fastest-growing data virtualization platforms on the market, Enterprise Enabler has been leading the innovation of data management, data federation and data virtualization for nearly 15 years. To serve its expanding base of customers, Stone Bond has grown its set of AppComm™ connectors to accommodate the widest range of enterprise and line-of-business data sources. Treehouse’s tcACCESS effectively becomes the “Mainframe AppComm”, providing full read/write access to a wide range of mainframe data sources on both z/OS and z/VSE platforms.

Wayne Lashley, Treehouse Chief Business Development Officer, said, “Our reputation for capably solving mainframe data integration challenges now extends to other modern enterprise data sources including SAP, Salesforce.com and Microsoft SharePoint. With the push of a button, our customers can securely expose these disparate virtualized sources to popular BI tools like Tableau and to other applications in standard formats like REST and JSON. Current, past and new customers can look to Treehouse to address any imaginable integration scenario.”

Commented Tom Sieger, Stone Bond SVP, Corporate Strategy and Business Development, “Embracing mainframe data sources bolsters the “enterprise” in Enterprise Enabler. We are excited to work with Treehouse to grow Enterprise Enabler sales into new markets and geographies.”

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About Treehouse Software, Inc.
Privately-held Treehouse Software was founded in 1982, and has hundreds of customers worldwide that benefit from the company’s industry-leading products and outstanding technical support. The traditional strengths of the company in performance management, security and software configuration management have been complemented by visionary leadership in mainframe data replication and integration and application modernization.

About Stone Bond Technologies, L.P.
Headquartered in the heart of Houston, Texas, Stone Bond Technologies was founded in 2002 with a commitment to innovation that continues today. More than just adding features to existing offerings, the company’s approach to information business systems is to make an enterprise’s data agile: to move data efficiently and easily, without barriers. Stone Bond’s client base continues to expand from its roots in the Energy industry to Financial Services, Life Sciences, Information Technology, Hospitality, Manufacturing and more.

Two Local Technology Companies Partner to Advance Cognitive Computing; Complementary Areas of Expertise Mean Better Data Integration and Individualization

Treehouse Software, Inc., of Sewickley, PA and Cognistx of Pittsburgh, PA announced a partnership to help customers with improved data integration and individualization to fully leverage the power of cognitive computing.

Technology industry leaders from Accenture to Gartner to McKinsey recognize the future of computing will be cognitive, calling it a disruptive force and estimating the industry to reach $200 billion by 2020. Cognitive computing is based on leading edge technology including artificial intelligence, natural language processing, Big Data, advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms.

The Treehouse – Cognistx partnership will allow customers to ingest massive amounts of data, whether that data is numbers, images, or audio files, and mine it to find insights that lead to action, and ultimately to increased revenue from improved customer engagement.

Since the mid-1990s, Treehouse Software has been a global leader in mainframe data migration, replication and integration, offering robust and flexible solutions for ETL, CDC and real-time, multidirectional replication between databases on various platforms.

Cognistx is an applied technology company harnessing state-of-the-art cognitive computing tools to help retailers reach individuals with intuitive, intelligent and individualized offers based on their past transactions, preferences, context and profile.

Cognistx complements Treehouse’s capability to deliver data with its machine learning algorithms that become more accurate with every transaction, delivering customized, personalized, prescriptive actions in the right context. Together, the two companies will co-market their capabilities, bringing new competitive advantages to customers who want to expand the use of their most valuable asset — data.

“We’re excited to partner with Cognistx to bring our world-class enterprise data acquisition capabilities to companies that recognize the massive opportunity cognitive computing represents,” said Wayne Lashley, Treehouse Chief Business Development Officer. “We provide the data foundation and Cognistx translates that data into insights, those insights into customer actions, and those actions into incremental revenue.”

“Few retailers do a good job of marrying technology with a customized customer experience that is tailored to their behaviors and timed according to how they might use a retailer’s offer,” said Sanjay Chopra, CEO of Cognistx. “With our proprietary algorithms and Treehouse’s enterprise data solutions, both our customers win. Only with large amounts of data can our system learn about the consumer and their preferences and how those change in order to deliver only the smartest, most individualized offers.”

About Treehouse Software, Inc.

Privately-held Treehouse Software was founded in 1982, and is a global leader in providing data migration, replication, and integration solutions for the most complex and demanding heterogeneous environments. Treehouse offers a comprehensive and flexible portfolio of software and tools for mainframe platforms, and also includes feature-rich, accelerated-ROI offerings for information delivery, and application modernization. http://www.treehouse.com

About Cognistx

Privately-held Cognistx was founded in 2015 and has a technology hub in Pittsburgh and operations offices in the Innovation Quarter in Winston-Salem, NC, and Raleigh. The company’s co-founders include Sanjay Chopra, a serial technology entrepreneur; Eric Nyberg, professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, who consulted with IBM on the Watson project and Jeffrey Battin, former owner of Communefx, a successful data analytics company. Other partners include Florian Metze, professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science; Jill Zoria, SVP Enterprise Development; Pete Minnelli, SVP Creative; and Karen Barnes, SVP Operations. http://www.cognistx.com

Mainframe CDC from Treehouse Software

The globalization of markets, increase of data volumes, and high demand for up-to-date information require new data transfer and exchange solutions for heterogeneous IT architectures, and as many customers have discovered, Treehouse Software has the right product (or combination of products) to meet any conceivable mainframe data migration, replication, or integration requirement. To meet many of these needs, Treehouse Software’s proven and mature tcVISION product moves data – as little as possible – as much as necessary. tcVISION is an innovative software solution that processes changed data in real time, in intervals, or event based.

The tcVISION solution focuses on changed data capture (CDC) when transferring information between mainframe data sources and LUW databases and applications. Changes occurring in any mainframe application data are tracked and captured, and then published to a variety of RDBMS and other targets.

tcVISION enables bidirectional replication for DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server running on Linux/Unix/Windows, and synchronizes each data source, first by doing a bulk load from source(s) to target and then by replicating only changes— only committed changes—from source(s) to target. So there can never be ambiguity as to whether a query against the target database involves uncommitted data.

Read some tcVISON customer success stories here.

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Visit the Treehouse Software website for more information on tcVISION, or contact us to discuss your needs.

 

Treehouse Software will be Exhibiting at CA World in November 2014

If you are attending CA World in Las Vegas in November, be sure to stop by the Treehouse Software booth and say hello!

We’ll be featuring our comprehensive and flexible portfolio of solutions for integration, replication, and migration of data between mainframe sources and any target, application or platform using ETL, CDC, SQL, XML and SOA technologies.

CA World ’14
November 9–12, 2014
Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino
Las Vegas, Nevada

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Visitors to our exhibits will learn how Treehouse Software is currently providing several large organizations with ETL and real-time, bi-directional data replication using tcVISION. tcVISION provides easy and fast bi-directional data replication between mainframe, Linux, Unix, and Windows platforms.

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We will also showcase tcACCESS, which integrates mainframe data and applications with open systems and Windows.

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Meanwhile, if there is a mainframe data replication project in your future, contact Treehouse Software today.

Cloud-y … with a 100 Percent Chance of Data

by Wayne Lashley, Chief Business Development Officer for Treehouse Software

Along with three of my colleagues, I recently participated in the Treehouse exhibit at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) event in Las Vegas. This is a conference where we have exhibited in the past, and I personally have attended several other times. In fact, I just learned that the DI in AADI no longer stands for “Data Integration”; this change was only made in the past couple of years, as in the past it was the data integration aspect that made the show particularly relevant to Treehouse.

Though data integration vendors such as Informatica, Pervasive and Adeptia—and Treehouse—were in attendance, their numbers seemed diminished over prior years. And while “Legacy Modernization” had an entire subject “track” a couple of years ago, a number of “name” LM vendors were notably absent this year, and the topic was only rarely represented in sessions.

But there was a predominant theme at the event, and its name is Cloud.

People have been talking about “Cloud” for years already, and it is a well-established concept with many dimensions and extensive implementations. And it’s probably familiar enough to The Branches readers that I won’t waste words describing it, other than to say that it is simply a way to offer computing services via the Internet without the subscriber—most Cloud offerings are subscription-based—knowing or caring what or where the physical implementation is.

Many people consider that Salesforce.com is the granddaddy of all Cloud services, and to my mind it popularized the term “Software as a Service” (SaaS). Evolutionary Technologies, Inc. (ETI), a long-standing player in the data integration field and a company that I have had a lot of contact with over the years, reinvented itself around 2005 as a SaaS company, in doing so placing the company on the leading edge of “aaS” providers and essentially defining an entirely new market space.

These days there are a number of other “aaS” genres competing for mindshare and dollars, the most dominant being “Platform as a Service” (PaaS). Once again, Salesforce.com seemed to define the space initially, but others such as Amazon and Google have since come to dominate it. Just this week I was invited to an event for Oracle partners where Oracle executives will present their concept for an Oracle Cloud PaaS. I recall a Microsoft Worldwide Partners Conference (WWPC) a couple of years ago where Microsoft kicked off its Azure Cloud platform. You don’t have to install Microsoft Office on your PC anymore; Office 365 runs in the Cloud.

Even legacy applications are getting the Cloud treatment: a company called Heirloom Computing has commenced offering a platform for running legacy COBOL applications in the Cloud.

Cloud has also entered popular culture and commodity services. There’s a TV commercial that I keep seeing advertising a Cloud-based service that automatically troubleshoots, tunes up and cleans up your PC.
In short, you’re nobody if you’re not in the Cloud.

D-for-“Data” may have morphed into D-for-“Development” in the AADI Summit name, but data replication, integration and migration remain very relevant in the Cloud age. Indeed, you can’t spell Cloud without a D.

To support provisioning of Cloud-based applications, there has to be a means for getting data from where it is now—often in mainframe-based legacy databases or relational databases on open systems, within a company’s internal IT infrastructure—to the Cloud facilities, be they public or private. This doesn’t happen by magic. We have recently been working in a customer implementation where Oracle and DB2 data are being replicated bidirectionally in a Cloud implementation using our tcVISION solution. Such a scenario posed a bit of a challenge for us in terms of licensing: the machines on which tcVISION is installed are not specifically known at a given point in time. So we had to adapt our licensing model to accommodate the new reality.

We expect to see continued growth and demand for our replication and integration solutions as Cloud offerings evolve and expand. Furthermore, we are working on a new Cloud-oriented solution in collaboration with Cloud platform providers. I have briefed several Gartner analysts on it, and their feedback has been encouraging. Check back to this space regularly for news on this exciting new Treehouse offering.

A Data Replication Solution that Hits theTarget (and Source)

by Chris Rudolph, Senior Technical Representative for Treehouse Software and Joseph Brady, Marketing and Documentation Manager for Treehouse Software

Today’s IT organization is dealing with any number of challenges, including heterogeneous environments, legacy applications, high-availability information systems, data silos, increasing data volumes, and escalating costs. These factors make it imperative that IT departments find cost-effective solutions for enterprise-wide data management, preferably using intelligent data integration and efficient data synchronization.

Data exchange in a heterogeneous IT infrastructure means harmonization of different data formats and data models for data exchange solutions. Very often, this data exchange is a complex and tedious task that represents a major cost factor. Data exchange is also time-sensitive and critical, hence reliability and auditability of all data movements is important.

Since the mid-1990s, Treehouse Software has dominated the ADABAS-to-RDBMS data migration and integration market, with its proven and powerful ETL, CDC, and real-time replication solutions. The addition of two mainframe integration products: tcACCESS and tcVISION, enable the migration of virtually any mainframe database or data source in a cost-effective manner.

Enterprise data integration with tcACCESS provides a powerful integration platform (mainframe software, workstation software, middleware) for IBM mainframes, enabling transparent integration of mainframe data sources and programs into open-systems applications using industry standards like SQL, ODBC, JDBC, and .NET. A modular software solution, tcACCESS, comprises a base system that can either be implemented as a CICS transaction or as a VTAM application, and provides its own communication modules. The heart of the system is the tcACCESS SQL Engine, which allows access to mainframe data sources using SQL statements, and features:

• Bi-directional data-exchange across heterogeneous systems
• Direct data access across heterogeneous systems
• Data transformation for data analysis and exchange
• Relational access to legacy data and applications
• Data federation – heterogeneous data views
• Integration of mainframe files and DBMS structures
• Data federation between mainframe and Windows/Open Systems data

CDC Replication with tcVISION

tcVISION supports data exchange between mainframe-based systems like IMS/DB and DB2, between mainframe and open-systems servers like DB2 and Oracle, as well as within an open-systems environment (e.g., DB2 LUW to SQL Server or Oracle).

tcVISION’s unmatched array of CDC methods includes “Loopback Suppression” for bi-directional updates, ensuring data integrity and replication efficiency between the data sources and targets so that changes received from a source system and applied to the target are not unintentionally propagated back.

The Problems:

• Different data formats
• Different data models
• Large data volumes
• Limited batch window
• Extract programs are costly to run in a chargeback environment
• Requirement for up-to-date information

The Solution:

Moving/replicating data…

• as much as needed
• as little as possible
• as transparent as possible
• as flexible as possible
• as secure as possible
• using as little mainframe CPU as possible with tcVISION

tcVISION is a flexible data replication product that focuses on changed data from virtually any mainframe data source and transfers information between mainframe and workstations or open systems–in bulk, either through batch Changed Data Capture (CDC) or in real time. Mainframe data exchange processes are considerably simplified using tcVISION. The structure of the existing mainframe data is analyzed by special processors, and the data mapping information is presented in a user-friendly and transparent format – even for users with no mainframe knowledge–and captured in a metadata repository.

tcVISION’s unique “stage processing” architecture allows for most (and in some cases ALL) of the ETL  and CDC processing to be performed on a Windows, UNIX, or Linux platform. This is an especially attractive feature for  sites that are already at 100% utilization of their mainframe CPU, or have a chargeback system in place.

tcVISION’s Windows-based Control Board provides an easy-to-use facility to configure and administer the data flow. tcVISION provides a variety of interfaces to allow seamless integration with ETL or EAI solutions.

Case in Point: Mainframe Data Synchronization at Blum

Blum manufactures high-quality fittings systems for kitchens and home furnishings with production plants in Austria, Poland, Brazil and the USA.  Their myriad replication challenges included continuous and bi-directional data replication between headquarters and subsidiaries, uni-directional replications between the mainframe and the Oracle Data Warehouse.

The Problem:

• Phase-in of new applications required parallel processing

The Solution:

• Bidirectional, real-time synchronization of DB2 and DL/I databases across LPARs using tcVISION DBMS Extension
• Results:
• Applications can coexist indefinitely
• Projects gain needed flexibility
• Record types easily handled

To learn more about tcACCESS and tcVISION or read additional Case Studies here.