Glaxo Wellcome uses OP/SMTP to deliver OS/390 application data to Exchange
Glaxo Wellcome Inc., based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is one of the nation's leading research-based
pharmaceutical firms whose primary corporate purpose is to discover, develop, manufacture and market
throughout the world safe, effective, high-quality medicines. In particular, Glaxo Wellcome is known as a
leader in respiratory, anti-viral (including AIDS/HIV), and central nervous system research with products
such as Flonase, Imitrex, Valtrex and Zyban. Other therapeutic research areas include: cardiovascular,
oncology, critical care, and metabolic diseases such as diabetes. The company employs approximately
8,600 people across the U.S.
From a technical perspective, Glaxo Wellcome had been a longstanding user of IBM’s
OfficeVision/MVS and DISOSS products for corporate email communications. The company was very early in providing
application information to its users via email. Glaxo Wellcome had developed interfaces via the RAPID and
DISOSS products from over 300 batch jobs that automatically delivered reports into a users email in-box. It
also has a TSO/ISPF based control process for moving mainframe programs into production that used the
RAPID DISOSS mail-enabling facility to alert users of successful software implementation into production.
RAPID is a software tool that creates an email message from output sourced from a mainframe
application, via special mainframe JCL.
Strategically, the company was very early in moving its users to the Microsoft Exchange platform. Today,
there are 43,000 users of Microsoft Exchange worldwide, distributed across 160 Exchange servers and
OfficeVision has been decommissioned.
Once users were moved to the Exchange platform, however, delivery of the existing mail-enabled
applications to Exchange was far more convoluted. RAPID and DISOSS talked, via the SNADS protocol, to
the Digital MR/SNADS product which in turn talked to Digital’s X.400 XMR product which in turn talked to
Digital MailBus 400 which, finally delivered the message into Microsoft Exchange.
“Messages looked crummy, but they got there” explained Jay Brame, Principal Consultant in the Global
Architecture and Planning Group. But this set of platforms was not Y2K compliant, was old, unreliable, in
some cases unsupported and had no upgrade path. “We were faced with having to replace the whole
system at a potential cost of over $200,000 in a very finite timeframe” explains Brame.
Glaxo turned to ReSoft International to help. ReSoft’s development partner TBS Software was developing a
replacement to the RAPID product that used SMTP as its email transport rather than SNADS. One of the
key requirements for Glaxo was 100% plug compatibility with the existing RAPID JCL.
“Users had developed their own JCL interfaces to RAPID to which we had no access. Therefore we had to ensure no
changes were required to existing JCL under the new scheme” said Jay Brame.
The final product, OfficePath(OP)-SMTP/Send, provides Glaxo Wellcome with a significantly more
streamlined mechanism for delivering mainframe application information to a users Exchange mailbox. Mail
now travels from the OfficePath-SMTP/Send product, via SMTP which is delivered as part of the IBM OS/390
operating system, into the Exchange SMTP MTA.
“We are very pleased with the final solution and support has been
superb” Brame says. Glaxo Wellcome will be utilizing the system not only for existing mail-enabled interfaces but also for developing new ones.
“By standardizing on OfficePath we have a platform to build on. This insulates us from the support issues of
using the IBM OS/390 delivered SMTP product where an SMTP message has to be built line by line and
there are no management tools. OP-SMTP-Send takes away those issues”.
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