News

BMC Pumps Up Mainframe Intelligence, Security, and DevOps

• By John K. Waters
• January 7, 2021

Enterprise software and services company BMC today unveiled new capabilities and enhancements for its Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) and Compuware portfolios. The new capabilities were designed to enable BMC mainframe customers to protect uptime and availability, defend the mainframe against cybersecurity threats, and advance enterprise DevOps.

BMC acquired mainframe application development tools provider Compuware last year. The deal brought together BMC's AMI offering and Compuware's Topaz suite, ISPW technology, and classic product portfolios to modernize mainframe environments.

In addition to its product portfolio, Compuware brought an accelerated feature release cadence to BMC, a trend that has been spreading throughout the software industry. The organization will continue releasing new capabilities every quarter, Compuware CEO Chris O'Malley told AppTrends in an earlier interview.

"Businesses today are under increasing pressure to ensure 24/7 availability, while optimizing their systems for speed, agility, and ease of use," said IDC enterprise systems management software analyst Tim Grieser, in a statement. "The ability to adapt is critical for business survival, let alone a successful evolution to a digital enterprise. Resilient, intelligent modern mainframe platforms leverage tools including AIOps to allow customers to reinvent their business for the digital age."

Leading the new feature lineup is the BMC AIM Ops solution, which is designed to enhance MainView, the BMC solution for optimizing mainframe systems management with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) through an upgraded and more intuitive user interface. The new feature was designed with both new and experienced mainframe users in mind, the company says. It's new AIOps capabilities allow organizations to identify and respond to problems before they can affect service levels and secure communications among enterprise systems with a RESTful API to support automation.

BMC also expands its mainframe security capabilities with new security controls, out-of-the-box security checks, and additional indicators of compromise, which allow customers to increase threat detection and response capabilities. Integrated with the Compuware Application Audit capability, BMC AMI Security allows customers to capture relevant data about user access and behavior, so they can quickly detect breaches and mitigate financial and brand reputation damages.

With the new Compuware zAdviser dashboards. DevOps teams can now see which Compuware DevOps toolchain products and capabilities are underutilized with. They can also deliver applications and services faster with the Compuware Topaz for Total Test product's enhanced automated testing capabilities, the company says, which simplify automated test case creation, expand test coverage with negative testing, and reduce rework.

There's a new integration between the Control-M and Compuware ThruPut Manager solutions, which is meant to ensure that jobs run at or before their expected times. The result of the integration is shorter, more efficient, and cost-optimized batch processing, the company says. Users can now use ThruPut Manager to customize the prioritization of mainframe jobs based on data from Control-M, BMC's app workflow orchestration platform.

And the new and improved BMC AMI Data for IMS is "the evolution of BMC solutions for IMS," the company says. It's designed to deliver optimized mainframe IMS transaction and data management so enterprises can improve availability of critical business services, meet and exceed SLAs, and better support agile application development with fewer resources.

"Our customers tell us they want to innovate and modernize faster in their mainframe environments, while also improving business resiliency and platform security," said John McKenny, SVP and General Manager of ZSolutions at BMC, in a statement. "The comprehensive set of BMC AMI and Compuware capabilities delivered today enables enterprises to make significant progress on all fronts with AI and ML-powered insights that drive intelligent operations, adaptive cybersecurity, and deeper insights into mainframe development. Combined with expanded automated testing capabilities that improve Agile development and delivery, enterprises can innovate faster and meet the growing demands of digital business growth."