Company Profile

The Australian Securities
and Investments
Commission (ASIC)
is an independent
Commonwealth
government body
established by the
Australian Securities and
Investments Act 1989. It
began on 1 January 1991
as the Austrialian
Securities Commission,
to administer the
Corporations Law. It
replaced the National
Companies and Securities
Commission (NCSC) and
the Corporate Affairs
offices of the States and
Territories.

In July 1998 it received
new customer protection
responsibilities and its
current name.

ASIC wished to replace
the CORBA components
in its UNIX eBusiness
and Lotus Notes workflow
application with MQ
that would allow for
robust, asynchronous
messages. These
applications also
communicated with
ADABAS/Natural
applications on a
mainframe using RPC
calls via a relatively
expensive middleware
product.

Whilst the middleware
product was capable of
doing the transport job,
it did not satisfactorily
address message boundary
handover and transactional
issues between MQ and
the ADABAS/Natural
application without
building bespoke code
to handle
failures/replays.

ASIC looked at transport
alternatives to/from
the mainframe applications
whereby the Natural
application could invoke
C/C++ routines to perform
TCP/IP socket connections.

The Dignus Systems/C++
cross-compiler allowed
ASIC to develop the
routines on a low-cost
UNIX platform prior to
porting them to the
mainframe. ASIC can
now successfully
send/receive data in its
Natural applications via
TCP/IP. Additionally,
further C++ routines have
been developed which
allow Natural to
manipulate the data
as XML in a DOM-like
manner allowing
seamless XML integration
with the eBusiness
applications.