Modern mainframe workloads are becoming more complex, as digital priorities drive new requirements for mainframe applications. To address and prevent issues, mainframe operators must have the information they need in a format that the rest of the war room team can understand and act upon.

Given the complexity of modern enterprise IT environments, serious problems inevitably crop up from time to time—problems with no clear fix, likely because it is difficult to determine where the problem is occurring and what its root cause may be.

When such problems arise, it’s time for a situation room – commonly known as the “war room.”

The war room is a crisis management technique that brings together representatives from across the IT landscape to hash out everything they know about the problem at hand. Working together, the theory goes, will lead to a better understanding of the cause of the problem and thus the necessary fix.

The participants in this exercise come from all corners of the IT organization, and in many cases, are people who don’t work together on a day-to-day basis. Each individual brings their own strengths and insights to the table—ideally for better resolution of the problem at hand.

Furthermore, if an issue gets to the war room stage, the problem likely has the attention of executives who will be on the call as well looking over the shoulder of the war room team, increasing the urgency and pressure to solve the problem quickly.

Sometimes, however, communication issues get in the way, as war room participants often speak different jargon. After all, this ad hoc team might consist of network operations, front-end leadership, security operations, cloud management, systems and virtualization operations, mainframe operations, and more.

Of all these various professionals, one stands out as being the one most likely to have communication challenges in a war room environment: the mainframe professional.

From the perspective of everyone else in the room, the mainframe is a world unto its own, with its own jargon, processes, and procedures. Even within the mainframe team, different operators may speak in different terms – and they all want to show the problem isn’t in their area.

The resulting opacity can lead to confusion and even distrust in the war room, torpedoing the collaboration so essential for solving the matter at hand.

Such opacity, however, isn’t a given. With the right tools, the mainframers in the room can provide the insights and information necessary to communicate the mainframe’s contribution to the crisis—or prove the mainframe is not the source of the problem.

Why is the mainframe so opaque? Demystifying the mainframe

In spite of its reputation for opacity, mainframe subsystems and applications generate a surprising quantity of telemetry. Furthermore, mainframe professionals have had access to system monitoring and management tools for generations.

The opacity challenge centers more on the context for such telemetry—how the mainframe ops team interprets the information from their tools and communicates it to the rest of the war room.

Adding to this challenge: the fact that the quantity of data coming from the mainframe continues to explode, just as it does across the rest of the IT landscape.

And yet, while the level of expertise across IT shops generally meets the needs of those organizations, the mainframe world is undergoing a generational shift as the old guard retires, leading to a drop in mainframe expertise in the enterprises most dependent on their mainframes.

Modern mainframe workloads are also becoming more complex, as digital priorities drive new requirements for mainframe applications. For example, a bank may have traditionally run only its core transaction processing on the mainframe, but now supports its mobile apps, business analytics, and AI-centric apps like fraud detection as well.

Not only are there more such applications running on the mainframe, but the corresponding workloads are interdependent—and typically require real-time responses (think fraud detection at the point of sale, for example).

All these forces of change are impacting the ability for the mainframe operators in the war room to have the information they need in a format that the rest of the team can understand and act upon.

Bringing modern mainframe observability to bear

The solution to the problem of mainframe opacity in the war room is to leverage modern mainframe observability tooling like BMC AMI Ops, which helps both seasoned and junior mainframe operators gain real-time insights into mainframe performance within the context of the modern IT landscape.

BMC AMI Ops establishes the baseline for mainframe performance and then continually compares mainframe behavior to that baseline, providing real-time visibility into any underlying issues with mainframe subsystems.

Using minute-by-minute comparisons and multivariate analysis, BMC AMI Ops can detect issues earlier than previously possible, freeing up the team’s time to work on the issue before it impacts customers.

As a result, BMC AMI Ops can identify the root causes of suspected issues, while also taking proactive steps to optimize the mainframe’s performance.

This ability to proactively deal with issues supports the mainframe operator in the war room, as it makes clear whether the mainframe is contributing to the issue at hand.

This focus provides the war room with either an “all clear” for the mainframe, or in the rare case where the problem is actually with the mainframe, BMC AMI Ops provides the information necessary to address the problem.

The Intellyx take

Observability is more than monitoring—it refers to the ability for a system like a mainframe to provide the telemetry necessary to understand the causes of issues and provide the data required to make any necessary fixes.

When mainframe operators present such insights in a war room situation, they can participate fully in the analysis of the crisis at hand, without the traditional opacity of the mainframe getting in the way.

Not only does this ability to participate lead to faster fixes, it also improves the ability of the war room team to collaborate, thus improving morale and better collaboration in the future.

In fact, the mainframe world must be able leverage a combination of systems monitoring for the mainframe, observability for the mainframe, as well as automation. If mainframe leaders leverage these tools together, they might be able to avoid the war room altogether.

No longer does the mainframe have to stand separately in the war room. With tools like BMC AMI Ops, mainframes are full-fledged participants in modern IT environments, war room or no.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. BMC is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used to write this article.

When BMC got its start in 1980, the mainframe was the only game in town. Forty-two years later, the mainframe is still an important part of BMC’s business. According to BMC’s annual mainframe survey, 95 percent of respondents—many of whom BMC has been supporting for years—remain committed to the venerable platform.

The question for BMC, therefore, is how to remain relevant in the modern, cloud-centric IT world?

One word: innovation.

BMC’s Four-Pronged Product Strategy

BMC drives innovation across its entire product line, which coalesces into four broad product categories. Its mainframe offerings remain at the core, with the BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) family, as well as the BMC AMI DevX DevOps tools for the mainframe.

BMC has also long been a leader in the service management market. Today, its flagship service management brand is BMC Helix, both on-premises and as a fully reworked SaaS offering. Third on the list is application workflow orchestration and automation within the company’s Control-M product line, available as either via SaaS or on premises.

Rounding out BMC’s offering are its AIOps and observability tools, also under the BMC Helix brand. In particular, BMC has recently announced BMC Helix ServiceOps, which combines service management and operations management into a single, predictive tool.

While BMC Helix and Control-M aren’t specific to the mainframe, the combination of capabilities that these products offer provides a clear value proposition to BMC’s mainframe customers, who all place the mainframe into the broader context of hybrid IT.

For these enterprises, the mainframe no longer stands alone in their IT strategies. Today, large organizations are moving to hybrid, cloud-native architectures. It’s imperative for such companies to modernize how they leverage their mainframes within this new context.

Dealing with Headwinds Away from the Mainframe

The enterprise landscape away from the mainframe—all those companies that don’t have or don’t want Big Iron—presents both the greater challenge and the greater opportunity for BMC. BMC faces some headwinds as it seeks to capitalize on this opportunity, as the sales motions for the product categories are diverse.

The service management market has largely consolidated, so BMC’s story within this market is that it offers the best alternative to ServiceNow. In the automation and orchestration space, BMC stands out because it doesn’t offer robotic process automation (RPA), a popular but flawed approach to task automation. Instead, BMC leverages its years of expertise to provide cost-effective workflow automation solutions across different departments and use cases.

BMC’s AIOps and observability story—now with an innovative ServiceOps twist—faces a crowded and noisy market (just the opposite of the staid service management space). For this opportunity, BMC offers a strong consolidation and replacement strategy to its customers, while also integrating with any tools that they would prefer to keep around.

This diversity of sales motions means that BMC takes a customized sales approach for each customer, highlighting specific product capabilities instead of a cohesive portfolio to support its customers’ transformation efforts.

Bringing Innovation to the Table

At its recent BMC Exchange customer conference, held online and in person in Miami, BMC executives tackled this problem head on by emphasizing BMC’s massive investments in innovation.

Innovation is traditionally a rare commodity in mainframe circles. However, given the shifting priorities of mainframe customers, combined with the generational change impacting mainframe professionals, innovation in this traditionally conservative market is an absolute must.

BMC is rising to the challenge with its BMC AMI DevX mainframe DevOps tooling, which helps organizations integrate their mainframe-based application development with their cloud-based development.

From the perspective of DevOps engineers—as well as ITOps personnel and application developers—the mainframe is one of many server options with its own strengths and weaknesses. BMC’s approach to DevOps supports and reinforces this perspective.

Perhaps the most significant innovations from BMC center on how it has been moving its BMC Helix product line to the cloud. Rather than tweaking legacy product code around the edges as some vendors might, BMC has invested substantial time and money rewriting its products along cloud-native lines. Such innovation may largely be hidden from view, but will pay enormous dividends for BMC and its customers, as it moves itself to the cloud.

BMC has also doubled down on its investments in AI (machine learning in particular), both for its AIOps offering as well as its new ServiceOps focus. This innovation will quickly place BMC in a leadership position among organizations struggling with the exploding number of tools in this crowded market niche.

BMC Innovation Extends to Emerging Technology

While the core of BMC’s innovation efforts focuses on moving current products forward, the company also invests heavily in emerging technology through its BMC Innovation Labs (see my recent article).

In these labs, BMC works in partnership with its customers and established partners to explore cutting-edge technologies like augmented and virtual reality. The labs were also responsible for bringing the predictive ServiceOps concept to market.

The labs’ recent emphasis has been on edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) as BMC fleshes out an edge management offering that leverages several of BMC’s technical strengths, including data management, analytics, automation, and security.

The Intellyx Take

While a large portion of BMC’s customer base remains enterprises with mainframes, it’s clear that its growth opportunities lie primarily outside this community. Bringing these two constituencies into one coherent strategy is a work in progress for BMC. The name for this strategy—more of a framework, really—is the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE), which emphasizes business agility, deep data-driven insights, and customer centricity.

The ADE is largely aspirational, providing a guiding star for BMC’s customers as they leverage IT to become digital businesses via several core tenets across customer experience, automation, data, and more. While the ADE is a work in progress for BMC and its customers, the company’s products are fully modern and ready to help enterprises both on and off the mainframe achieve their digital transformation goals.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. BMC Software and ServiceNow are Intellyx customers. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article.

A small team of former Shell Oil employees founded BMC Software in 1980, focusing on software for mainframe computers.

In the intervening four decades, BMC expanded its focus to include distributed systems as it completed dozens of acquisitions. The company went public in 1988 and subsequently private again in 2013. Global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) acquired the company in 2018.

Given this rich history and commensurate established customer base – including continuing expertise in the mainframe marketplace – one might jump to the conclusion that BMC might struggle with ongoing innovation.

Under the auspices of CEO Ayman Sayed, however, innovation is a strategic priority for the venerable vendor. While much of BMC’s innovation takes place behind the scenes, it presents a public face to its efforts: the BMC Innovation Labs.

Realizing the Vision for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise

One of Sayed’s first initiatives at BMC was to call for the development of the vision for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE).

The ADE is a framework for how customers can leverage technology to compete in an increasingly disruptive future. The ADE contains five technology tenets: Transcendent Customer Experience, Automation Everywhere, Enterprise DevOps, Data-Driven Business, and Adaptive Cybersecurity.

While the ADE lays out a high-level roadmap for customer success, BMC’s own product capabilities depended on collaboration with a broad partner ecosystem. The company had the courage to lay out anaspirational yet necessary vision with the confidence they would get there over time.

This gap between vision and reality is what drives innovation at BMC. Sayed set a difficult but not impossible goal for the company – a goal that innovation alone would help BMC achieve.

Traditional software research and development, while necessary, would never be sufficient to achieve such audacious goals. The company needed to step up its innovation game – and the BMC Innovation Labs were born.

About BMC Innovation Labs

The BMC Innovation Labs bring together BMC employees as well as customers and partners to accelerate the development of products and solutions that power the ADE, and the BMC Innovation Summit this past June was an opportunity to get an insider’s look at projects in development.

“Think of it as an incubator of internal startups, where anybody can submit an idea for innovation,” Ayman Sayed explained. “An internal team reviews the ideas, and we fund a select number of them with seed funding and then progress it like a startup, with the hope that out of 10 or 12 of these we get one or two new products that are exported to the customer.”

The goal of the Labs is to help both internal and external parties reimagine and reinvent how they think about technology and how it helps organizations meet business needs. They provide an incubator where BMC customers and partners can work on ideas that go beyond traditional enterprise thinking.

Not all ideas that people bring to the Labs will pan out – and that’s part of the idea. They are a safe place to fail fast while taking an iterative approach to creating, nurturing, and testing new ideas.

“BMC’s Innovation Lab exists today as an incubator or accelerator with the goal of devising novel ideas that can either disrupt or complement the overall company,” explained Sam Lakkundi, VP of Innovation for BMC. “We know that our innovation lab lets us discover the best opportunities, excite our employees, collaborate on new ideas and lets us take an innovative idea and turn it into a business outcome that will provide tangible benefits that can be a long and complex process.”

Examples of Innovation from the BMC Innovation Labs

Some innovations from the Labs have found their way into BMC products, while others are still in the experimental stages.

BMC Helix IoT Edge for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is an example of a Labs-based innovation underway. It is an extension of the BMC Helix IoT Edge, a platform for collecting, aggregating, and analyzing operational technology data at the edge.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles version of this platform uses modern drone technology to deliver the BMC Helix IoT Edge capabilities to enterprises with remote operations in industries such as telecommunications, chemicals, and mining.

Another example in the BMC Innovation Labs is Automated Data Analysis, an artificial intelligence-driven tool for deriving actionable business insights from past dashboard creation endeavors.

It automates the creation of dashboards, leveraging machine learning, natural language processing, and voice automation to support modern data operations.

A productized graduate of the BMC Innovation Labs is for log data enrichment, which became an addition to the BMC Helix Operations Management solution. Log analytics and enrichment provide the ability to collect and analyze log files from a variety of data sources in order to provide early diagnoses of potential issues and avoid service disruptions.

Other projects within the BMC Innovation Labs are still in the experimental stages.

Teams are working on applications of virtual reality and augmented reality to improve the customer experience as well as to provide immersive virtual ‘dashboards’ for IT operations personnel.

Additional work in progress includes an application for computer vision to support workplace compliance. For example, the system can automatically alert warehouse workers when they aren’t wearing the proper safety equipment or if they are in the wrong position on the floor – issues of both safety and regulatory compliance.

The Intellyx Take

Despite the saying, it is indeed possible to teach (smart) old dogs new tricks – but it takes dedication and effort. The BMC Innovation Labs are an excellent example.

Simply setting up the Labs is only part of the solution. It was also important for BMC to drive interest and participation using modern techniques like gamification.

“We have internal hack-a-thons which help us be sure we don’t miss a good idea. We also ran an Innovation Challenge,” Sayed continued. “We received over 500 submissions and sifted through them and picked 80 or 90. Now we’re funding a number of them and some are progressing through different business units. Some are going through the BMC Innovation Labs.”

Not every innovation to come out of the labs will be successful – but 100% success isn’t the goal of any innovation effort. The bulk of the value derives from effort itself, while successful products provide the validation that the BMC Innovation Labs are on the right track.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. BMC is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article.