Generative AI emerged as one of the hottest technological topics in 2023 and it looks to be accelerating in 2024 as companies build out their strategies for adoption. While AI-generated artwork, videos, and text have grabbed headlines on the topic, the use of generative AI to create insights from business data is an exciting application of this new technology. The January 2024 release of enhancements to the BMC AMI suite of solutions includes generative AI to provide insight for BMC AMI zAdviser users with recommendations for DevOps.

Beginning in January, the monthly key performance indicator (KPI) report emailed to BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise customers will include AI-generated insights based on BMC AMI Code Pipeline usage data. Each month, a list of KPIs will be processed for summarization, analysis, and recommendations for improvement based on the four key DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics: lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to restore service. With this information, customers will be able to quickly see a report on the past month’s development activity as well as positive and negative trends and recommendations on how to improve the velocity, quality, and efficiency of their software development.

BMC Lead Product Manager Spencer Hallman says of the new feature, “It’s putting the ‘advisor’ in zAdviser. The information we used to share in a 30–60-minute meeting is now at the customer’s fingertips in an easy-to-read format, providing incredible insights into their development efforts.”

This new report is an exciting first step in BMC’s efforts to leverage the power of generative AI to help our customers optimize their mainframe environments.

To learn more about this and other BMC AMI innovations, click here.

Have you ever watched a group of dancers and thought, “How do they do that?” Whether it’s a dance team at a sporting event, a group doing a line dance at a wedding, or just someone cutting a rug at a party, it’s easy to watch others with awe. Dancing involves more than just innate skill; learning what to do, practicing those moves, and making changes along the way are part of the process of becoming a good dancer.

Come to think of it, dancing isn’t all that different from mainframe management. Nobody is born knowing exactly what to do to keep a mainframe organization running successfully; learning new skills, mastering them, and adapting to change are crucial to your organization’s success.

The 1970s brought new looks to the worlds of mainframe and of dance. As disco fever was gripping the world, so too was a new way of working on the mainframe. While the shift from punch cards to 3270 “green screen” terminals may not have been as groovy as doing the hustle under mirrored balls, each had their moments, but are now outdated. It may have been the epitome of hip in 1974, but appearing on a dancefloor in a leisure suit and platform shoes in 2023 will draw some looks. In mainframe management, as in dancing, leaders need update their repertoire to keep up with the times.

Becoming an all-star dancer

So, how can you keep up with the times and ensure that your organization is making the most of modern techniques? Envision mainframe transformation as a graceful dance into the future and learn three key steps: mainframe DevOps, system monitoring and observability, and utilizing the hybrid cloud.

Get your groove on with mainframe DevOps

Just like successful dance teams, development and operations teams must move in harmony, collaborating to create development and delivery processes that work together in-sync. Particularly useful is the adoption of enterprise-wide development and delivery practices that are used across both mainframe and distributed teams.

Also key to DevOps success is the ability to master the newest dance moves, leveraging the latest development tools and practices, including a modern integrated development environment (IDE), automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and shift-left automated testing to create an integrated DevOps toolchain that enables seamless collaboration and grants better visibility throughout the develop and deploy workflow. Modern tooling also helps recruit and retain top talent and reduces the learning curve for new hires by providing a developer experience that matches the practices developers are learning in school and on other platforms.

This combination of harmony and modern techniques improves overall agility, a trait essential to both dance troupes and DevOps teams. The ability to quickly pivot and react to changing market conditions with applications and services that exceed your customers’ expectations can give your organization a distinct competitive advantage.

Getting jiggy with IT: artificial intelligence (AI) for mainframe

In terms of mainframe operations, AI fills a number of roles needed by every successful dance team:

• In automated operations, AI acts as a kind of choreographer, orchestrating seamless mainframe operations, automating routine tasks and ensuring a fluid allocation of resources while reducing manual intervention and operational costs.
• Using predictive analytics, AI steps into the role of a clairvoyant dancer, helping mainframe teams foresee and prevent performance bottlenecks and outages, ensuring a reliable and uninterrupted performance.
• Like a nimble dancer, AI detects threats, identifying potential vulnerabilities and cyberattacks in real-time and responding swiftly to secure mainframe performance.
• AI jazzes up data analytics, extracting soulful insights from mainframe data, offering an improvisation of advanced analytics for smarter business decisions and a competitive edge.
• Acting as a helpful partner, AI utilizes chatbots and virtual assistants to take the lead guiding us through the dance of mainframe tasks, providing efficient support and ensuring a seamless user experience.

Tango in the cloud

Leveraging cloud integration with the mainframe was cited by 35 percent of BMC Mainframe Survey respondents as a top priority in the coming year. Organizations are looking to leverage the cloud to dance to a leaner, cost-optimized tune while swapping intricate choreography for a streamlined data ecosystem thanks to hybrid cloud data management.

Additional advantages, like enhanced security compliance, cyber resilience, and the ability to harness AI-based analytics for mainframe data make the cloud a worthy dance partner.

Integration with the cloud ensures that mainframe data remains nimble with real-time analysis and insight, enhances data security, and provides a cost-effective, scalable environment to store and manage increasing volumes of mainframe data.

Dance like nobody’s watching

While these steps may take more practice than shifting from the robot to the macarena to the dab, learning these three dance steps will help your organization face today’s mainframe challenges and be prepared to adapt to whatever moves the future may hold.

Looking to dance to the perfect song?

At our recent Mainframe Executive Council meeting in Nashville, BMC’s mainframe experts joined with executives who are driving the mainframe forward and, with the help of singer-songwriter Meghan Linsey, wrote our very own mainframe anthem, “Mainframe Proud.” Listen to the song now and follow along with the lyrics printed below.

Lyrics

We are the original cloud
We put the man on the moon
We are resilient and proud
Been around forever
But we’re brand new

The world’s just out here having fun
They don’t know they need us to run
Airplanes flying
Credit card swiping
Packages arriving
That’s Us

We run the world
We run the world
Flying through the hybrid clouds
We run the world
We run the world
Making sure it don’t break down
We run the world
We run the world
Yeah, we’re mainframe proud

We’re always innovating
Writing code til my head is aching
Staying up til the work is done
Will I ever see the sun

New codes arriving on time
The test ran well, it’s a good sign
Somehow we get it done
That’s why we’re number one

We run the world
We run the world
Flying through the hybrid clouds
We run the world
We run the world
Making sure it don’t break down
We run the world
We run the world
Yeah, we’re mainframe proud

What if the headlines haven’t caught up to reality? For the past several years, an impending demographic shift has been a hot topic of discussion in mainframe circles. The issue at hand: as seasoned mainframe professionals approach retirement age, next-generation talent arrives to take their place—and the world of the database and its DBAs is no different. And those retiring are taking decades of experience and institutional knowledge with them, creating a skills gap that mainframe organizations around the world and across industries will have to deal with in the near future.

Results of the 2023 BMC Mainframe Survey indicate that the future may already be here and, thanks to modern mainframe technology, the situation may not be nearly as dire as predicted. Only eight percent of respondents to this year’s survey identify as part of the “Baby Boomer” generation (those born from 1946 to 1964), while an identical eight percent identify as “Gen Z” (born between 1997 and 2012).

With the future demographic shift becoming a present reality, how can mainframe organizations bridge the skills gap between seasoned veterans and newcomers to the platform, while also getting the next generation of mainframe stewards up to speed faster and preserving institutional knowledge? I have one word for you—automation.

By leveraging automation, especially of mundane and time-consuming tasks, organizations can streamline operations, maintain consistent performance, and enable less-experienced mainframe professionals to focus on learning essential skills—all at the same time. In short, automation makes your organization faster while increasing opportunities for retiring professionals to mentor and pass along business-critical knowledge to the new generation.

Automating data management

Mainframe data management is an excellent example of an area where automation can make a significant difference. Traditionally, as developers worked on new applications, they had to stop coding and enter a change management request for each new database or schema change required by the application. These change requests were in turn handled by database teams that manually approved and executed each change.

Modern continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines streamline the process with automated database change management requests, approvals, and changes. Instead of relying on an individual to evaluate each request, this process codifies existing rules, thus preserving institutional knowledge, and evaluates requests against them, reducing dependency on workforce expertise and ensuring that database changes will not delay delivery of new applications.

Intelligent database reorganization

As mainframe workloads increase, so does the volume of data accessed on the platform. In the past, organizations relied on database experts to ensure that everything ran smoothly. With less-experienced professionals taking on these roles and databases becoming more fragmented at a faster rate, disorganized data can cause significant delays within application performance, consume expensive MIPS, and may even cause an outage to reorganize the data.

The Reorg Advisor in BMC AMI Apptune for Db2^® (part of BMC AMI SQL Performance for Db2^®) helps database administrators (DBAs) avoid these delays by notifying BMC AMI Utility Manager for Db2 of detected application degradations. BMC AMI Utility Manager for Db2^® can then initiate reorganizations (reorgs) as needed, instead of relying on scheduled reorgs that may or may not improve application performance. Once the reorg is completed, BMC AMI Apptune for Db2^® provides feedback on whether, and by how much, application performance was affected.

This automated review of performance eliminates guesswork from the reorg process and avoids the need for specialized knowledge of particular databases that may require more frequent reorgs while also avoiding the cost of unnecessary reorgs.

Measuring the advantage

While automated mainframe data management can bridge skills gaps and lead to significant cost savings and application performance improvements, database and application development managers will always be looking for ways to improve their processes. A series of dashboards in BMC AMI zAdviser provides insight into how performance has improved, as well as areas that may need more work. as well as areas that may need more work.

The Change Manager for Db2 dashboard enables managers to make evidence-based decisions to continuously improve the delivery of database schema changes and reduce rollbacks, with information on evaluated and modified objects, the number of work IDs completed, duration from creation to completion, and more. Using this dashboard, managers can see how work gets spread out on a daily basis, time spent to complete tasks, and which tools are being utilized or under-utilized, enabling them to identify areas to improve and establish baselines to help measure progress.

Included in our October release of BMC AMI enhancements, a set of new dashboards provide usage information for BMC AMI Data Utilities for Db2^®, showing how many total utilities have run, how many users are running the utilities, and which utilities are spending the most and least CPU time, as well as the numbers of indexes and tables that have been processed and zIIP usage for each utility. New Copy and Recover dashboards give users even further insight, showing utilities executed, objects processed and the number of copies and recoveries, as well as longest time to recover and average time to recover.

These dashboards give managers detailed information on how and when BMC solutions are being used, enabling them to fine-tune how their teams work and make that work more efficient.

Preparing for the future—and the present

Mainframe workforce demographics are shifting before our very eyes. While replacing retiring DBAs and the knowledge they’ve gained from spending decades on the platform can seem daunting, there are ways to make this change your advantage and improve upon the present state while also preparing for future changes.

As the automation of mainframe data management shows, organizations can reduce costs, improve application performance, and enable new mainframe professionals to make an immediate difference. Take this opportunity to improve efficiency, speed delivery of new features, and codify the knowledge of a retiring generation, continuously building a better, more modern mainframe for generations to come.

Read this BMC Community post to learn more about all of the BMC AMI Data for Db2^® enhancements included in our October release.

Thanks to the interconnected hybrid cloud world and the convenience of our phones, the digital world is at our fingertips. Wherever we are, we can access information and services for entertainment, shopping, banking, and health, almost instantly. Our experiences aren’t limited by the type of device we’re using. We can be watching a show on a smart TV, continue watching on a smart phone as we leave the house, and then listen in our car. We can seamlessly access and edit the same document in the office, on the plane, and at home.

Retail, banking, and shipping companies strive to provide similar uninterrupted experiences. We no longer need to enter payment details and shipping information on each e-commerce site we visit. Thanks to payment platforms and website integrations from UPS, FedEx, and others, we can purchase items from multiple websites using a single login, then instantly see whether our package has been shipped, where it is now, and when it is expected to arrive.

We’re now accustomed to receiving the same user experience, with the same tools, media, and content, wherever we are and whatever device we’re using. So, why should our expectations of a work experience be any different?

The latest innovations announced for the BMC AMI portfolio are centered on hybrid cloud integration with an open borders approach to mainframe computing, with the aim of creating consistent, complementary experiences not only for mainframe professionals, but for the customers they serve, too.

Bringing the power of the cloud to the mainframe

The new BMC AMI Cloud suite of solutions empowers organizations to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy for mainframe data management. Integration of mainframe data with the hybrid cloud enables your organization to choose the on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud strategy that is best suited for your needs. This provides an efficient and high-preforming alternative to replace or augment proprietary mainframe virtual tape library (VTL) systems.

Storage in the cloud with BMC AMI Cloud Data allows faster access to crucial data and offers improved disaster recovery preparation and response.

BMC AMI Cloud Vault enables the creation of secure off-platform backup copies of data and fast disaster recovery that doesn’t rely on mainframe systems. The creation of immutable copies of data stored in the cloud protects against cyberthreats like ransomware while also enabling standalone (bare metal) data recovery at any location.

BMC AMI Cloud Analytics enables the integration of your mainframe data with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) platforms to gain valuable new business insights. By quickly and efficiently moving data to the cloud, then transforming it for use with AI/ML tools (without consuming costly MIPS), the solutions make your mainframe data actionable, opening the door to new possibilities of insight and innovation.

Increased quality, more efficient development

The BMC open-borders approach not only integrates the mainframe with the broader IT ecosystem, it also allows mainframe development, operations, data, and security applications to interact, breaking down siloes and providing full system visibility. New BMC AMI DevX integrations increase developer efficiency, improve application quality, and put the information that developers need at their fingertips.

New Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions for BMC AMI DevX File-AID enhance developers’ use of their preferred development environment by streamlining the data browsing and editing of IBM^® Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS^™) data sets, reducing time spent on test data management.

An integration between BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID and BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline makes it faster and easier for developers to find abending code, fix any issues, test, and move the code back into production.

The ability to reuse test case input stubs in BMC AMI DevX Total Test enables faster generation of new test cases for changed programs.

Stronger security, faster incident response

To ensure optimal enterprise system security, mainframe security can’t be siloed separately from enterprise security strategies. BMC AMI Enterprise Connector for Venafi, which integrates the mainframe with enterprise certificate management solutions, now supports automated bulk certificate management, empowering security teams to implement hundreds, or even thousands, of security certificates on the mainframe each month.

Integration of BMC AMI Security with ServiceNow ITSM solutions supports automated workflows, increasing efficiency and reducing time to response while providing centralized incident response that coordinates security incident management across the enterprise.

Optimizing database reorgs, identifying SQL bottlenecks earlier

An integration between BMC AMI Reorg for Db2^® (part of BMC AMI Database Performance for Db2^®) with the rules-based automation of BMC AMI Apptune for Db2^® (part of BMC AMI SQL Performance for Db2^®) enables right-on-time database reorgs, ensuring that reorgs aren’t repeated unnecessarily, reducing CPU usage, helping to minimize costs, and providing for peak response rates and improved application performance.

New enhancements improve the database administrator (DBA) and developer experiences. BMC AMI DevOps for Db2 now integrates with GitHub Actions, joining integrations with Jenkins and Azure DevOps to further developers’ ability to use their tools of choice, while a modern, developer-friendly BMC AMI Command Center for Db2^® user interface enables the shift-left identification of SQL bottlenecks. Now, the developer and DBA (especially the next-gen DBA) easily identify SQL bottlenecks. And an enhancement to BMC AMI Change Manager for IMS^™ (part of BMC AMI Administration for IMS) enables systems programmers to route commands from a single screen across multiple IMS systems within an IMSPLEX.

Further enhancements to reporting and log records facilitate database performance optimization and debugging. Enhanced report comparison BMC AMI Fast Path Analyzer/EP history files makes it easier to spot usage trends within BMC AMI Database Advisor for IMS^™ while additional Fast Path log records in BMC AMI Log Analyzer for IMS^™ abend reports provide increased visibility into the debugging process.

Integrated solutions for an integrated world

With our July 2023 quarterly release, BMC continues its commitment to support and advance your organization’s digital transformation. Just as integrations of entertainment, shopping, banking, and other digital experiences—and the convenience they provide—have become commonplace, we believe that the integration of BMC solutions, and of the mainframe with other technologies, improves performance and reliability, leading to optimized experiences for mainframe professionals and end users alike.

Learn more about the enhancements included in the July 2023 quarterly release on the BMC What’s New in Mainframe Solutions page.

We live in a data-driven world. Thanks to the modern digital economy, organizations are able to collect data that businesses of the past would have only dreamed of, tracking everything from financial transactions to customer habits, geographic and demographic information, and more. The mainframe plays a crucial role in the collection and retention of this data. While the exact numbers may vary (with some as high as 80 percent) recent studies agree that the majority of corporate data resides on the mainframe.

Company policies and industry and governmental regulations often require that this information be stored for years. With the platform’s longstanding role as the transactional workhorse behind financial, insurance, retail, and healthcare industries, this means that organizations have decades of current and historical data that can be mined to extract new and valuable insights—about their business and their customers—in order to identify opportunities for innovations that will better serve their customers.

This potential is often overlooked. Written in formats unreadable by most analytics engines, mainframe data traditionally has been stored on tape or virtual tape libraries (VTL) and then, all too often, forgotten. Slower access to the data, and the time and effort required to transform it for consumption, have discouraged organizations from realizing its full value.

At BMC, we believe there is a better way. We believe seamless integration of your data with a hybrid infrastructure, whether that be on-premises, hybrid, or cloud, object storage opens up a new future of possibilities for you. By moving away from the paradigm of storing data in proprietary mainframe hardware stacks and instead establishing a bi-directional data flow and integration, you can immediately and seamlessly share your mainframe data in an analytics-ready environment. Making your core business data accessible to analytics services and the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) enables you to unleash potential that your business already possesses, helping to drive business transformation that will delight your customers and give you a competitive edge.

BMC AMI Cloud Analytics

The ability to realize the hidden potential of mainframe data is one of the reasons BMC is so excited to announce the BMC AMI Cloud portfolio. Alongside data management and security solutions, the new BMC AMI Cloud Analytics solution connects your mainframe data with the hybrid cloud with easily-accessible object storage, then transforms it into open formats for consumption by analytics engines and AI/ML applications.

As opposed to data being accessed on tape or VTLs, which can cause bottlenecks, and then being transformed on the mainframe (thus incurring processing costs), BMC AMI Cloud Analytics allows faster data processing at scale. The solution uses the IBM^® System z^® Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) to queue mainframe-formatted data for transfer into the cloud, where it is then transformed to the target format, giving you faster access to valuable insights while avoiding expensive mainframe CPU consumption.

Realizing your data’s potential

As organizations collect and store higher volumes of data than ever before, safeguarding and protecting that data has become not only a business imperative, but a legal and regulatory one, as well. Those managing mainframe data must consider the way it is archived, how to recover it in the event of a disaster or data loss, how to protect it from cyberattacks, and how to gain value from the insights it contains.

While we’ve focused on data analytics in this blog post, BMC AMI Cloud solutions not only enable you to unlock mission-critical data and make it actionable, they also help you modernize your core infrastructure with cloud-native backup, disaster recovery, and data management, as well as strengthen your defenses against cyberthreats.

The possibilities provided by a hybrid cloud data strategy are endless. Now is the time to consider how you can modernize your data management and unlock the potential your data contains.

To learn more about BMC AMI Cloud solutions, visit our BMC AMI Cloud page.

Customer satisfaction is not only about the external end user, but also the mainframe professionals behind the scenes who make it all work. When you improve their experience on the platform and boost their happiness, productivity, and efficiency, your external customers and your business reap the benefits. Companies investing in modern development processes and streamlining operations are pulling ahead of the competition.

At BMC, we aim to improve the experience of everyone who touches the mainframe, directly or indirectly. Our April release is built on features that emphasize the developer experience with familiar tools and automation while also optimizing database and infrastructure performance.

Introducing BMC AMI DevX

Organizations drive growth by creating useful, innovative digital experiences that delight their customers. Faster, more agile software development enables your organization to react quickly to changing market demands and, ultimately, make change your advantage.

A positive developer experience can add even more value by fostering innovation. The availability of familiar tools and automation of repetitive tasks allow developers to do what they do best—create innovative business solutions.

In support of this trend toward faster, more innovative development, we are pleased to announce that all of BMC’s mainframe application development solutions are now part of an expanded BMC AMI portfolio with a new name, BMC AMI DevX, that stresses our focus on the developer experience, or “DevX.” For a full list of new product names, see this BMC Community post.

It’s about more than just a name, though. Each quarter, we’ll continue to release new features and integrations for the products that have helped your organizations on their DevOps journeys, along with new solutions that help developers innovate faster.

This April we’ve delivered new capabilities that help automate and simplify releasing software on the mainframe. BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline (formerly BMC Compuware ISPW) now supports concurrent development in Virtual Studio (VS) Code, further enabling developers to work quickly and efficiently, while the new impact analysis search feature enables discovery of critical dependencies that may be affected or broken by new code.

Identifying and gaining insight into abends is now easier with new ChatOps capabilities. Automated failure alerts in BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID (formerly BMC Compuware Abend-AID) deliver root cause analysis through popular chat applications Slack and Microsoft Teams, while a new feature allows users to set notification levels for “runaway” abends that impact multiple users.

Improved Availability and Response Times

Your customers won’t be satisfied with innovative solutions if they can’t use them. The responsibility for near-constant uptime and responsiveness falls to operations teams who must detect and resolve performance-affecting issues and database administrators (DBAs) who must ensure that database response times don’t slow applications. Leveraging automation and proactive analysis improves the job experience of both of these groups while helping you give your customers the best user experience possible.

Among the challenges faced by mainframe operations teams is delivering a different kind of “experience.” As seasoned mainframe professionals retire and the platform increasingly integrates with distributed and cloud systems, organizations are turning to newer employees—and those with less experience working on the mainframe—to manage operations. The user experience provided by modern tools like BMC AMI Ops can counteract this lack of on-the-job experience with user-friendly interfaces and embedded expertise while leveraging automation to allow operations professionals to focus on high-priority tasks.

Introduced this April, a guided product tour helps familiarize new users with BMC AMI Ops, while a faster loading interface, list of open views, step-by-step deployment task list, and scrolling navigation enable administrators to access and utilize the data they need more quickly. Further enhancements make it easier to tune and resolve issues in Java, IBM^® IMS^™, and IBM^® Db2^®with more detailed information, expanded visibility, and faster access to records.

Operations teams aren’t the only ones to benefit from database management enhancements. BMC AMI Data now features automated application-driven performance optimization. An integration between BMC AMI Utility Manager for Db2^® and BMC AMI Apptune for Db2^® enables teams to automate database reorgs based on real-time application performance information, helping DBAs, system programmers (SysProgs), and development teams automatically maintain peak response times and efficiency.

A new BMC AMI Data feature even improves DevX: an integration between BMC AMI DevOps for Db2^® and Microsoft Azure DevOps allows developers to initiate database changes from their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

Faster Innovation, Improved User Experiences

As organizations seek to more quickly deliver extraordinary front-end experiences to their customers, they cannot ignore the experiences of users on the back end. Enhancing your organization’s developer experience with automation and freedom of choice encourages the development of creative business solutions; easy-to-use user interfaces (UIs) and utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) speed issue resolution and flatten the learning curve for mainframe newcomers; and automated database optimization helps DBAs ensure peak response times.

While each of these enhancements serves to improve the user experience of your employees, they also create technologically advanced, high-performing, and always-available experiences that will delight your customers. By focusing on the mainframe experience as a whole, this quarter’s BMC AMI feature release continues BMC’s mission to empower your organization to maximize the satisfaction of all mainframe users.

For an in-depth look at all of the enhancements included in BMC’s April release, visit our What’s New in Mainframe Solutions page.

It’s the beginning of 2023, time again for making New Year’s resolutions. The dawning of a new year presents an excellent opportunity to recommit yourself (and your organization) to self-improvement and to the achievement of goals that will carry you forward into 2024 and beyond.

At BMC, we believe that you have the opportunity to make change your advantage. The use of digital services in almost all aspects of daily life has seen a sharp increase in recent years and continues to rise. Given the mainframe’s role as the backbone of the digital economy, this has led to increased transactional and data volumes, as well as market demands for new applications and services, developed and delivered as quickly as possible.

Not only is change a constant, it is occurring faster than ever before. Making this change your competitive advantage enables you to set yourself apart from slower-moving competitors, giving you the agility to react and adapt to future disruptions by offering your customers not only the services they demand, but the ones they need to adapt to this change, themselves.

But making change your advantage goes beyond satisfying and delighting your customers. The nature of mainframe work is changing, as well, with increased interaction with other platforms, new, modern tooling, and the adoption of DevOps, AIOps, DataOps, DevSecOps, and other practices on the platform. By creating a positive integrated experience for everyone touching the mainframe, you can enable greater innovation and faster time-to-market for new services and applications while optimizing your employees own user experience.

To this end, BMC’s January quarterly release of enhancements to the BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX portfolios continues our investment in a modern developer experience with increased automation of development tasks, greater insight into code testing, more productive database management, and improved reporting of security standard compliance.

Integrate and automate development

Automation provides developers’ more time to work on innovative solutions to market demands and enables faster, more frequent development and delivery of new applications and services. Leveraging new technology and opening the mainframe to greater integration will help you stay ahead of competitors that are slower to adapt.

In our January release, BMC continues our commitment to opening up capabilities via API with expanded mainframe application development integrations with Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions.

The new BMC AMI DevX Total Test extension for GitHub Actions enables developers to run continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) test workflows immediately after updating a piece of code, while the BMC AMI DevX Data Studio plugin for Jenkins ensures that developers are using the right data for automated tests.

Two new extensions for Microsoft Azure DevOps empower developers to easily download source code from BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline, automate code quality checks, and automate ISPW operations such as generate, promote, deploy, or regress for faster CI/CD pipeline setup.

These new extensions give developers the flexibility to speed delivery of mainframe innovations by leveraging their CI/CD platform of choice.

Increased visibility into testing

A new BMC AMI zAdviser dashboard aggregates testing activity from BMC AMI DevX Total Test and BMC AMI DevX Performance Test to give users a single-pane-of-glass understanding of their code testing activity. This new dashboard was designed to be used in conjunction with the DORA Metrics, Quality, and Benchmarks dashboards, empowering users to understand how code is being tested and with the high-level results of that testing.

Enhanced DBA user experience

A new user interface in BMC AMI Database Advisor for IMS^™ increases productivity with more powerful automated actions, workflows, and scripts. And utilization of the HSTATS command within BMC AMI Command Center for Db2^® improves SQL performance tuning and aids shift-left development by enabling DBAs and developers to easily migrate statistics between catalogs.

Evaluate adherence to security standards

Given the pace of innovation and increasing integration of the mainframe with other systems, ensuring the security of new applications and services is of utmost importance. In fact, results of the 2022 BMC Mainframe Survey show that, for the third year in a row, compliance and security are the top priorities for the platform. Providing security teams with easy-to-read, automated compliance standards and data reporting enables them to quickly uncover and address security gaps before they can be exploited by malicious actors.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), a combat support agency of the United States Department of Defense, publishes Security Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIGs) that provide configuration standards for handling and managing security software and systems. Manually ensuring adherence to these guidelines can be difficult and time-consuming. It’s no surprise, then, that automated compliance reviews are offered for distributed systems. But what about the mainframe?

BMC AMI Security now offers out-of-the-box automated DISA-STIG reports. These reports provide further insight into the strength of mainframe security systems, helping to ensure adherence to these guidelines on mainframe systems, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Make change your advantage in 2023

Making change your advantage in the new year means delivering intuitive and integrated self-service experiences for your organization’s mainframe professionals. With January’s release of enhancements, BMC renews its commitment to being your strategic partner as you implement changes that deliver outstanding results in 2023 and beyond.

For an in-depth look at all of the enhancements included in BMC’s January release, visit our What’s New page.

We are in the midst of a mainframe renaissance. Dead is the notion that the mainframe is going away. Instead, we are ushering in a future of increased capacity, greater innovation, and more strategic investment. Successfully growing organizations are embracing this change, adopting approaches that increase their agility and speed while more completely integrating the mainframe with their enterprise systems and processes.

The 2022 BMC Mainframe Survey results are in, and they show that capacity is growing across all sizes of mainframe shops, with over 60 percent of respondents reporting that their investment in the platform is increasing. These increases tie directly to changing workloads on the platform as transaction and data volumes and the number of databases increase more rapidly—and unpredictably—than ever before.

To help keep pace, successful organizations are strategizing by integrating their mainframe with their enterprise-wide practices. We also see organizations focusing their efforts on achieving faster software development and more frequent, higher-quality releases with DevOps, AIOps to improve performance and availability, and platform integration with enterprise security policies and monitoring to combat the latest cyber threats. To do so, they’re doubling down on the strengths of the platform while incorporating new technology to make it easier for a new wave of users to work with and embrace the mainframe.

BMC’s commitment to partnering with our customers to optimize and transform the mainframe while delivering familiar, approachable experiences is showcased in our October quarterly release. These innovations enable the use of familiar environments for mainframe development, greater end-to-end visibility into services, and increased integration with enterprise-wide operations.

A familiar interface for mainframe development

Fast response is crucial to meeting constantly evolving customer expectations. The 2022 BMC Mainframe Survey shows that four out of five organizations want to update applications more frequently, with 14 percent updating their mainframe applications every day. Attracting, onboarding, and retaining talent can be a challenge, though. Mainframe code, especially older code, can be quite complex, and most colleges and universities eschew the “green screen,” teaching development in modern integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio Code (VS Code). In fact, the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey found that nearly 75 percent of respondents said they had worked with VS Code over the past year and want to work with it in the future.

To help meet the need for faster software delivery lifecycles and overcome staffing issues, organizations are integrating tools that remove inhibitors and make the mainframe more accessible to a wider array of developers. To that end, our new IDE empowers developers of any skill level to leverage the tools and interfaces with which they are most familiar to understand, update, test, and troubleshoot code on even the most complex systems.

The new BMC AMI DevX Workbench for VS Code enables developers to easily access mainframe resources to quickly code, compile, and debug applications using their preferred modern development tool. Going beyond code, the DevX Workbench Explorer extension provides the same ease of use while searching, browsing, editing, and managing data sets and members. With these tools, developers can leverage a one-stop shop of modern mainframe development tools that are intuitive and easy to use.

This improved developer experience not only helps attract new talent to the mainframe, it also gives both new and seasoned developers a familiar environment in which to work, decreasing onboarding time and enabling them to be more productive, faster.

A system-wide view of capacity

The 2022 version of our mainframe survey also shows that 65 percent of respondents use AIOps across mainframe and non-mainframe platforms. As more and more services and applications use multiple platforms, organizations are clearly seeing the benefits of enterprise-wide capacity and performance management.

Earlier this year, BMC introduced an integration between BMC AMI Ops and BMC Helix Discovery that enables automated, service-aware topology mapping. Building upon that advanced end-to-end visibility, we have announced a new integration between BMC AMI Ops and BMC Helix Continuous Optimization that delivers a mainframe-inclusive system-wide view of capacity.

Feeding data directly from BMC AMI Ops to BMC Helix Continuous Optimization enables operations teams to create a standardized report of mainframe, cloud, and distributed data, providing a clearer understanding of cross-platform service delivery.

Other BMC AMI Ops enhancements, such as user interface improvements (including the display of consolidated performance data and custom dashboards) and expanded probable cause analysis help operations teams take advantage of machine learning to solve workload issues in an intuitive, easy-to-use environment.

The renaissance continues

The results of the 2022 BMC Mainframe Survey show that the platform is both growing and changing at a rapid pace, with more organizations embracing an open-borders approach that uses mainframe, distributed, and cloud systems across applications. It’s become essential to fully integrate the mainframe with enterprise development and operations practices to ensure agility, resilience, and security while making work on the mainframe no different than on any other platform.

With our latest quarterly release, BMC continues the mainframe renaissance, offering solutions that build upon the strengths of the platform while utilizing new technologies to make it faster, stronger, and more accessible than ever.

Read more about BMC AMI DevX Workbench for VS Code in this blog post.

As the saying goes, “the only constant in life is change.” In just the past few years, the way we live our day-to-day lives has changed drastically, with an incredible increase in the use of digital services for everything from shopping and banking to socializing and working. This has, of course, meant that the businesses and organizations that provide these services have had to adjust, not only to increased transactional and data volumes, but also to customer demand for newer, faster applications and services. In the current digital economy, every company faces disruption. Your success, however, may depend on how you deal with it.

The ability to react quickly will set you apart from competitors whose processes, tools, and mindset keep them flat-footed in the face of changing market forces and customer expectations. By making change your competitive advantage, you can be ready to react and adapt to the next major disruption, prepared to offer your customers services that help them thrive in their new “normal” while operating securely with minimal interruption.

With the help of BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) and BMC AMI DevX solutions, your organization can quickly and efficiently develop and release new applications and services, more quickly react to security threats, and find and remediate service-impacting issues faster than ever before. Our July quarterly release enhances these abilities by driving continuous software development and delivery, improving security management, and more.

Increased insight into DevOps initiatives

To continue to satisfy customers and stay on the cutting edge, mainframe organizations are increasingly utilizing DevOps to make their software development and delivery quicker, more agile, and most importantly, more responsive to the changing digital landscape. But how do these organizations gauge their success? To truly know whether mainframe teams are adopting the tools and practices they need, organizations must measure their development, deployment, and issue resolution and compare the results to key performance indicators (KPIs). Luckily, modern tooling can help.

BMC AMI zAdviser, a free service to customers on current maintenance, collects customer-supplied data and leverages machine learning to help organizations measure software development and deployment and identify trends that may improve or hinder the speed and agility of the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). A new KPI dashboard in zAdviser gives organizations valuable insight into how their mainframe software delivery measures against DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics.

Already well-established in the world of distributed DevOps, DORA’s four key metrics were developed after years of research and analysis of data from organizations worldwide. The BMC AMI zAdviser KPI Dashboard for DORA Metrics brings these metrics to the mainframe, standardizing KPIs across environments and providing clearer visibility into hybrid applications and environments.

With the ability to track deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR) and change failure rate, organizations can make data-driven decisions to help continuously improve the mainframe application development process by delivering high-quality software faster and resolving application failures more quickly.

Speaking of MTTR, a new enhancement seamlessly integrates BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID with leading ticketing and messaging software, providing real-time notification of application failures. By enabling automated creation of trouble tickets and instant production of diagnostic information, this integration allows development teams to begin working on resolution immediately, leading to quicker recovery.

Secure certificate management for the mainframe

Certificate management is integral to system security, but manually moving, configuring, and updating certificates can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and prone to error. BMC has partnered with industry-leading certificate management provider Venafi to provide one of the first integrated solutions for automated, controllable mainframe certificate management.

The new BMC AMI Enterprise Connector for Venafi helps prevent malicious use of connections in and out of the mainframe. The solution protects application uptime and increases your enterprise-wide Zero Trust security stance with automated certificate management and built-in validation that your certificates are installed and working correctly to protect mainframe-to-enterprise connections and communications.

Embracing change

The way customers interact with your business, and the market space it inhabits, is changing rapidly. Embrace change and use it to your advantage. With the enhancements included in our July quarterly release, BMC continues its pledge to partner with your organization to make change your advantage, optimizing and transforming the mainframe to continue to power the digital economy.

Mainframe optimization often comes down to giving organizations and teams the freedom to choose how they work to advance the platform while delivering new applications and services that delight their customers. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to mainframe management, application development, and security. Organizations need to be free to customize their processes and workflows to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of their mainframe teams and give their employees the autonomy that fosters productivity and attracts new talent to the workforce.

This quarter’s enhancements to the BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX portfolios expand freedom of choice for mainframe organizations and the professionals who comprise them while accelerating innovation, hardening security, and empowering resilience.

Git for the Mainframe

The use of Git for source code management (SCM) has been prevalent in distributed development for years, but mainframe development teams have been limited by a reliance on platform-specific SCMs. As applications increasingly span both mainframe and distributed systems, organizations are looking for more consistency in processes and tooling, as well as a centralized repository for all code.

BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline integrations offer developers the unique ability to manage source code with Git, then leverage BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline to build and deploy on the mainframe. More flexible than an all-or-nothing approach to Git implementation, the pairing of BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline and Git enables organizations to choose, on an application-by-application or team-by-team basis, the processes and tools that best suit their needs. Mainframe-exclusive applications can use BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline as their system of record, while hybrid applications can keep source code in one repository, managed with Git.

New feature branching sandboxes in BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline increase productivity by providing developers with an isolated work environment in which they can make changes to code without affecting, or being affected by, other developers’ work. Seamless integration with Git means that developers can merge these changes back into the main codebase, then use BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline to build and deploy on the mainframe with a simple right-click.

An Intuitive Interface for Operations

The face of mainframe operations is changing. The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has enabled ops teams to be prepared for issues before they happen. Warned of a potential issue by analytics tools, users can consult monitoring tools to find and diagnose the root cause, reducing the mean time to detect and mean time to repair.

A new user interface in BMC AMI Ops further streamlines the process, bringing together early detection and actionable details in an improved user experience. AI-based detection, probable cause analysis, and system monitoring data are unified to give users a more complete view of potential service-impacting events and enabling faster response and remediation. Users can see issues through AI-based monitoring or through threshold violations with automated root cause workflows to resolve the problems – all within the same interface.

Zero Trust on the Mainframe

As the occurrence of cybersecurity events continues to increase, mainframe security cannot be managed as a separate entity. For true system security, organizations must apply the same standards, methods, and capabilities across the enterprise. As organizations have implemented Zero Trust security practices, however, many have failed to integrate the mainframe into enterprise security initiatives.

BMC has partnered with Illumio to provide the industry’s first Zero Trust solution for the mainframe. BMC AMI Enterprise Connector for Illumio solves challenges like data compatibility and network connectivity, to allow the mainframe to be fully integrated into Illumio’s Zero Trust framework. With the choice to manage all Zero Trust accounts from one solution, organizations can now apply common enterprise security practices to mainframe accounts.

Code Validation Shifts Left to Minimize Security Risks

BMC AMI DevX Workbench for Eclipse new integration with Veracode enables organizations to discover security risks in mainframe applications early in the development lifecycle. After editing and debugging in the Topaz Workbench IDE, developers can use a Veracode IDE Scan to identify vulnerabilities in the code. The Veracode integration allows developers to shift left and scan code for security defects early in the development lifecycle, where they are easier and less costly to fix.

Day One Support for IBM^® DB2^® 13 for z/OS

Alongside our quarterly release, BMC has also announced day-one support of the recently announced IBM^® Db2^® 13 for z/OS across our BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX portfolios. Whether you immediately migrate to Db2 13 or continue using Db2 12 for the foreseeable future, you can rely on the continued excellence of our solutions and count on BMC to help make your migration seamless.

Better Together

The enhancements included in our April 2022 quarterly release help ensure that your organization employs the processes and tools that best suit your needs. From customized software development with Git and BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline, to enhanced options for AI for IT Operations (AIOps) analytics and monitoring, to mainframe-inclusive enterprise security initiatives and seamless implementation of Db2 when you need it, BMC continues to partner with you to provide innovations that give you freedom of choice as you optimize and transform the mainframe.