BMC Innovations Provide Greater Data Visibility and Accelerate Mainframe DevOps Adoption

By STS News Desk On Jan 6, 2022

BMC Survey Confirms Mainframe As Platform For Innovation

Vital cross-platform visibility and context improve service quality, speed software delivery

BMC, a global leader in software solutions for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, announced new capabilities and integrations across its BMC AMI (Automated Mainframe Intelligence) and BMC Compuware portfolios. Together, the innovations help customers improve service quality and accelerate software delivery by providing greater data visibility and context-based insights across their IT environments.

Enhance Service Quality with Better Data

The BMC Helix Discovery solution now automatically maps and visualizes service dependencies across mainframe and distributed environments using application network connection details sent from the BMC AMI Ops product. This allows users to prioritize problems according to the possible business impact. The added visibility and context across systems help enterprises resolve service issues faster and improve service quality.

The new BMC AMI Ops integration with Splunk, coupled with the BMC AMI Security integration, allows an extensive collection of enriched security data, operations, and performance information to be visible to security and operations teams. This shared visibility, together with greater frame of reference, enables teams to surface and investigate threats that might have otherwise gone undetected before they impact business services.

“The mainframe continues to play an important role in the future of digital business,” stated Chris Steffen, research director, security and risk management, Enterprise Management Associates. “But to meet rising digital demands and deliver the highest quality customer experience, operations and development teams must have the visibility to prioritize problems impacting critical services and continuously improve the software delivery cycle. A mainframe-inclusive topology and actionable software development metrics give teams the insights to make fact-based decisions.”

Accelerate DevOps Transformation through new Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Metrics

According to a Forrester study, “the ability to capture software development KPIs has become an important component to a development team’s modernization efforts.” To succeed in digital transformation, it is critical to select modern mainframe development tools with the ability to capture meaningful process metrics, such as quality, velocity, and efficiency.

Development managers often lack insight into developers’ behaviors, processes, and adoption, restricting their ability to guide their teams. The BMC Compuware zAdviser solution is the first to provide mainframe DevOps analytics for organizations that develop mainframe code. It is also the only solution that captures data on how mainframe developers develop their code and what features and functions they are employing during different software development life cycle stages. With the BMC Compuware zAdviser analytics and the new KPI dashboards for ISPW, Topaz, and Topaz Total Test, development teams can optimize the customer experience through new KPI metrics. These metrics also give development managers the visibility and actionable insights to reduce defects, accelerate the software delivery process, and drive DevOps transformation with modern development tools.

It is equally important to prevent credential theft and insider threat activities. To help companies act on malicious events before a compromise can occur, the BMC AMI Security expert now allows organizations to secure privileged users and credentials through their preferred External Security Managers (ESMs) on the mainframe – giving security teams real-time visibility into who, when, and how z/OS® is accessed.

According to BMC’s 16th annual mainframe survey2, 40 percent of the organizations surveyed make staffing and skills a top priority. BMC has launched a new training and certification program for mainframe customers and partners. The curriculum includes both free and subscription-based self-paced courses, e-books, and webinars on the BMC AMI, BMC Compuware, and Control-M for z/OS solutions, as well as the mainframe platform and infrastructure. New courses and certifications will be released monthly to help mainframe users advance and evolve their skills for the mainframe of the future/mainframe modernization.

The survey also highlights that 92% of executives and technical professionals globally see the mainframe as a platform for long-term growth and new workloads. These new innovations enable enterprises to consistently deliver high-quality customer experiences.

“Our mainframe clients tell us that improving service quality is the number one concern on their minds,” said John McKenny, senior vice president and general manager, Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation at BMC. “The new capabilities we announced today, as part of our team’s 29th quarterly release, help them get one step closer to the visibility and insights they need to achieve their mainframe digital transformation goals.”

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