This year’s SHARE conference in San Diego was a busy one for product announcements, with the issues of mainframe security, compliance and modernizing your legacy applications being the most popular. Here’s a look at what came out.

Security and compliance

Most of the security software announced at the SHARE mainframe conference had another goal in mind: compliance. In other words, it’s important to make sure your mainframe is secure, but it doesn’t mean much if you can’t prove it when the auditors come hunting.

NewEra Software released Image Focus 6.1, which includes two compliance-related features. The first allows system programmers to access the IT resources they need while maintaining security for compliance purposes. Another can identify and track changes and anomalies in load libraries and partitioned datasets, so you know when there’s been a problem. Beta Systems Software announced Beta 96 Enterprise Compliance Auditor, which can detect critical conditions and events in your IT systems while continuously documenting everything it’s monitoring. And JME Software released Deadbolt Monitor, which allows you to use a Web browser to access live and historical records generated by RACF, ACF2 or Top Secret security systems.

In other security product news, another feature of NewEra’s Image Focus is Fast DASD Erase for z/OS, which overwrites tracks and cylinders with binary zeroes. Meanwhile, JME also released Deadbolt Password Reset, which allows you to use a Web browser to reset your RACF, ACF2, and Top Secret passwords.

Application modernization

Modernizing your legacy applications on the mainframe was another big theme at SHARE. CASI Software released a new version of its CICS2PDF, which creates PDF documents from CICS applications. The new version adds AES-128 encryption for the PDFs and includes embedded PDF file attachments. Similar is its new version of JES2Mail/JES2FTP 4.5, which has more PDF document creation capabilities.

CA released new versions of its InterTest and SymDump software. They enable batch support for nested DB2 stored procedures to help developers debug code that’s critical for modernizing legacy applications into a Web-based or SOA environment, as well as helping traditional CICS transactions and applications to be integrated into SOA.

Attachmate is releasing its first version of mainframe terminal emulation that can run on Microsoft Windows Vista, XP, and Office 2007 and 2003. MVS Solutions is releasing ThruPut Manager 6 Automation Edition, which automates batch workloads on z/OS.

Other: networking, storage, high availability, software costs

The remaining products from SHARE focus on a bevy of mainframe issues. ISAM and Phoenix Software are addressing software costs. ISAM is doing it by offering a subscription-based service to analyze your software asset costs, and Phoenix is doing it by making some of its JES execution resources eligible for offload on the zIIP engine, where MIPS used don’t count in software licensing cost formulas.

Neon Enterprise Software is focusing on high availability. HALO can compress data to databases with short application outages, while Online Reorganization Director ensures 100% application availability during database reorganizations. AES and Software Diversified Services are offering networking packages. AES’s CleverView for TCP/IP v8.0 is a z/OS-based TCP/IP monitor, while Software Diversified Services has software that automates FTP processes and provides auditing records for them. Finally, Innovative Data Processing announced FDRMOVE, which is z/OS disk volume consolidation software.