Many governmental organizations are under shrinking budgets with increasing pressure to deliver web services from existing mainframe installations. There are many third-party software solutions that can help these organizations in taking their mainframes and making them into web services. IBM have always been innovating the solid mainframe concept since its inception. Cobol has web services built-in. IBM provides tools that can correlate Web services into flows and generate runtime access to application flows. You can also monitor applications that use the mainframe web services. Both CICS and IMS runtimes have inbound and outbound support for Web services. The pre-packaged component, SOAP for CICS is offered free to CICS v2 users.
Iona Technologies offers its Artix family of mainframe web services products. These are Artix Mainframe Transformer and Artix Mainframe Developer. They support .NET and Java clients for web services. Any existing COBOL application that has a callable entry point can be used to create a Web services interface for that application. The Artix tools take the data types from Cobol and generate the XML/WSDL/SOAP messages automatically. Even if your Cobol program does not have a callable interface you can use Artix Mainframe Developer to develop a new service on a mainframe to access that program.
OpenConnect Systems offers Mainframe2Web Secure Solutions to web-enable mainframe host applications. Using this you can offer secure access to business information and applications running on mainframe, midrange and Unix systems.
Lately there has been a lot of interest in web service-enabling mainframe applications particularly with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). The reason is that companies want to use web services for EAI applications (Enterprise Application Integration). There is more interest in access mechanisms provided by Web services to Mainframe solutions.