One of the top priorities industry veteran Ayman Sayed brought to enterprise software vendor BMC Software upon taking the helm in 2019 was to instill a corporate vision across the 39-year-old company.
The result: The Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE), a vision BMC, its customers, and any enterprise should follow to become a stronger digital business.
According to BMC, an ADE will achieve measurable results in the areas of agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights through five technology enablers: transcendent customer experience, automation everywhere, adaptive security, data-driven business, and enterprise DevOps (see the figure).
This comprehensive vision for enterprise IT over the next five years will continue to enable BMC to provide leadership to its customers – but for itself, the company had some portfolio holes to fill, enterprise DevOps in particular.
Lacking a solid DevOps offering, an acquisition was in order. BMC could have acquired a mainstream DevOps tools company. But instead they acquired a transformative mainframe tools vendor, Compuware.
Dusting off the Venerable Mainframe
It’s true that BMC got its start on the mainframe, and continues to evolve the platform with AI and machine learning through a portfolio of popular mainframe solutions. Given the forward-looking, modern thrust of its ADE vision, however, does rounding out its enterprise DevOps enabler with a mainframe play make sense?
The answer is a resounding yes, given Compuware’s recent history bringing the mainframe to the modern world of application development. “5 ½ years ago, we committed and dedicated ourselves to mainstreaming the mainframe for customers as a necessary enabler for agile and DevOps,” explains Chris O’Malley, who retains his position as president and CEO of Compuware now that it’s a BMC company. “We had to get rid of the platform’s idiosyncrasies as a means to increasing mainframe software delivery velocity, quality, and efficiency.”
During O’Malley’s tenure at the helm of Compuware, the company recast itself as an enterprise DevOps tooling vendor, revamping the developer experience and introducing new capabilities and advancements to support modern agile development, while integrating with an extensive DevOps toolchain of open source and other third-party tools across the development lifecycle.
During that time, Compuware successfully mainstreamed the mainframe for both trail-blazing and fast-follower enterprise customers, including financial services firms, insurance companies, and many other enterprises that have long depended on the mainframe to better compete in the digital age.
Compuware’s efforts align quite nicely with BMC’s long-term mainframe strategy. “BMC had already been ‘modernizing the mainframe’ similar to how Compuware was ‘mainstreaming the mainframe,’” explained Bill Miller, president of ZSolutions at BMC.
Today, such modernizing and mainstreaming go hand in hand as BMC rolls out its ADE vision to its customers, with enterprise DevOps on the mainframe an essential enabler of the vision.
ADEs as Data-Driven Businesses
BMC and Compuware are most complementary within the application development arena in their support for databases and improved cybersecurity.
BMC has long offered several tools to help create, modify, manage, and assure the performance, availability and resilience of mainframe databases. BMC’s solutions in this area support the IBM DB2 relational database management system for z/OS, as well as the older and still efficient IMS database.
This deep mainframe database expertise fits in nicely with Compuware’s DevOps offerings. “SQL in DB2 is the #2 language on the mainframe after COBOL,” O’Malley explained. “A common bottleneck in mainframe development involves the coordination and implementation of application and database changes, and often requires the expertise of a DBA.”
Bottlenecks of any kind are anathema to DevOps. Resolving slowdowns within the database team, especially in conjunction with Compuware’s automated testing tools including Topaz for Total Test, is essential for achieving the ADE’s enterprise DevOps goals.
BMC also brings IMS tooling to the table. IMS – the IBM Information Management System – dates from the Apollo moon mission in the mid-1960s, but remains a popular mainframe database among many of BMC’s customers.
Today, however, those customers are facing a different sort of problem: IMS personnel are retiring. “We’re investing in IMS with new products to bring customer experience to bear in IMS,” Miller said. “This helps to solve the problem with the aging workforce.”
Mainframe database support is important for more than DevOps, of course. Another enabler of the ADE vision is the data-driven business, and for customers with mainframes, those data are typically on the platform.
BMC continues to innovate in this area as well with its Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) solutions, which leverage AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics with the goal of a self-managing mainframe.
The Mainframe Technical Debt Challenge
In spite of the combined efforts of BMC and Compuware to mainstream and modernize the mainframe, there is still a commonly held misperception that the mainframe is ‘old’ or ‘legacy.’
The reality is more complex: while the mainframe is a fully modern platform, many enterprise mainframe applications are nevertheless burdened with technical debt.
Technical debt refers to past shortcuts or other poor programming decisions that represent problems that today’s or tomorrow’s development team must eventually address. Such debt can thus slow down innovation. “When our customers drive future velocity, technical debt rears its ugly head,” O’Malley pointed out.
IMS’s half-century of history underscores its role in the technical debt challenge. “The largest banks and insurance companies still depend on the benefits of IMS,” O’Malley explained. “They’re grappling with technical debt, using the Topaz suite to address it.”
Addressing technical debt on the mainframe is an important prerequisite for rolling out new and updated applications – a top priority for many mainframe shops. BMC’s upcoming 15th Annual Mainframe Survey provides some clarity on this point. “78% of respondents say it would be useful if they could update mainframe applications more frequently than they currently do,” the survey reports.
The Intellyx Take
The biggest takeaway from BMC’s acquisition of Compuware is how important enterprise DevOps is for the ADE vision, and the central role the mainframe plays as well.
The mainframe customer is not sitting on the sidelines, watching nimbler competitors pass them by. On the contrary: the newly mainstreamed mainframe is now a platform for innovation and increased business value.
This is the new perspective on the mainframe that explains BMC’s acquisition of Compuware, and aligns with the ADE vision overall. “Our largest customers are growing their mainframe footprint,” Miller said. “Applications are still moving to the mainframe.”
The mainframe no longer stands alone, a solitary host isolated from the distributed computing world. Today’s mainframe is a full participant in the modern enterprise IT landscape, bringing its unparalleled reliability, scalability, security and power to a new generation. BMC’s vision is helping to lead the way.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. BMC Software is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. Image credit: BMC Software.
