We design and build custom API layers that connect modern corporate networks to established mainframe architectures. Each engagement starts with a protocol audit and ends with a documented, secure bridge your operations team can maintain.
What changes when the bridge is in place
Mainframe teams stop writing point-to-point scripts for every new request. One API layer handles protocol translation, session handling, and data mapping, so your modern services get a clean contract instead of a tangle of custom connectors.
Mutual TLS, OAuth2 service accounts, and field-level encryption sit between your network and the mainframe. Credentials stay in a vault, sessions are audited on both sides, and nothing sensitive crosses the bridge in plain text.
Nightly batch jobs become optional. With request-response and change data capture patterns, your CRM, analytics, or portal sees mainframe data as it changes, not as it was at 2 a.m. Latency drops from hours to seconds.
Every field mapping, transformation rule, and error handler is documented in one place. When a new system needs mainframe data, the team adds a route rather than reverse-engineering a decade of undocumented interfaces.
We start with a two-week discovery sprint: map the mainframe interfaces, identify the data your modern systems actually need, and define the API contract before any code is written. You see the plan before we touch production.
Every engagement follows the same path: we map the mainframe landscape, define the API contract, then build and verify the connection before it touches production traffic.
We inventory the legacy systems, their protocols, and the data they expose. You get a clear map of what can be bridged and what needs a wrapper first.
Together we define the API endpoints, payload shapes, and error semantics. This becomes the single reference both your team and ours code against.
We stand up the translation layer: protocol conversion, session handling, and data mapping between the mainframe and your corporate network.
Mutual TLS, credential vaulting, and field-level encryption are applied before anything moves. We test auth paths and audit logging on both sides.
We run the bridge in parallel with existing batch flows, compare outputs, then switch traffic. Monitoring stays on for the first weeks to catch edge cases.
Each service is a concrete layer of the bridge between your corporate network and the mainframe estate it depends on. Here is what we build, and what it does once it is live.
We map the mainframe's native transaction set to a REST or message-based API that your cloud services can call directly. The layer handles protocol translation, data type conversion, and session state so your applications see a clean interface instead of CICS or IMS quirks.
A dedicated gateway sits between your corporate LAN and the legacy host, enforcing mutual TLS, IP allow-listing, and credential vaulting at the edge. Traffic is inspected in both directions, and the bridge logs every call for audit without adding noticeable latency to your batch windows.
COBOL copybooks, VSAM records, and DB2 tables rarely match your modern schemas. We build and maintain the transformation rules that convert field formats, handle nulls and defaults, and preserve precision across numeric and date types, so the data arrives intact on both sides.
When nightly batch is too slow, we wire change data capture from the mainframe into an event stream your downstream systems can consume. You get near-real-time updates for inventory, orders, or customer records without rewriting the host application.
We connect your corporate identity provider to the mainframe's security manager, so users and service accounts keep consistent permissions across both environments. Role mapping, session timeout, and privileged access reviews are configured as part of the integration, not bolted on later.
After go-live, we provide dashboards for bridge health, transaction volumes, and error rates, plus a support desk that understands both the API layer and the mainframe side. You get a single place to raise issues and a defined path for adding new endpoints as your architecture evolves.