The word is out! BMC AMI Ops Monitoring delivers a significant financial return. How significant? According to the recently released and commissioned The Total Economic Impact™ of BMC AMI Ops Monitoring study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of BMC, a 130 percent return on investment (ROI), a net present value (NPV) of $2.94 million, and a benefits present value (PV) of $5.19 million over three years. These positive results are driven by halving unplanned mainframe outages, achieving significant cost savings from retiring outdated legacy systems, and reallocating full-time employees to more critical tasks to enhance overall productivity.

BMC AMI Ops Monitoring yielded these results with an integrated solution that automates actions and centralizes control across mainframe environments by monitoring operating systems, databases, networks, middleware, and storage; optimizing performance; and minimizing downtime risks. Additionally, the solution’s advanced automation and observability features enable organizations to proactively manage their mainframes, detecting and resolving issues before they impact operations. This comprehensive approach improves operational efficiency and supports strategic business growth by ensuring high system availability and performance.

130 percent ROI—A closer look

Let’s dive into insights gathered by Forrester Consulting through interviews with professionals who have hands-on experience with the solution. The results were aggregated and combined to form a single composite organization. Weaving together their experiences and analyzing the ROI, Forrester analysts crafted a compelling narrative.

The study found that, in addition to reduced MSU usage and improved visibility, the composite company representing the research achieved a 50 percent reduction in unplanned outage downtime, resulting in a $1.4 million retained profit over three years.

“We’ve cut downtime in half with BMC AMI Ops Monitoring. Monitoring all in one place has really given us that ability in a way that we didn’t have before.”
—VP of operations, financial services

$4M+ in legacy solution cost savings

Also, by consolidating and automating monitoring, the composite company reduced retired legacy solutions costs by 80 percent and achieved a three-year total savings of $4,050,000.

“BMC has allowed us to reduce the number of licenses and the number of the functionality that we need from our legacy solution. We will potentially eliminate it entirely, which will generate even more savings going forward.”

—VP of operations, financial services

$607k savings by reallocating full-time monitoring employees

As the composite company shows, organizations face the challenge of reducing costs while monitoring numerous environments and navigating a shortage of mainframe talent―all while handling increasingly active and unpredictable workloads.

“Prior to [BMC] AMI Ops, with the legacy system, we had multiple people monitoring usage for multiple platforms. BMC allowed me to reallocate probably three full-time employees from monitoring into other departments and to other areas of the firm. We were able to repurpose them.”

—VP of operations, financial services

Nine-to-five isn’t a thing anymore; every hour is a business hour. Across demographic groups, customers are using the web and online applications to conduct banking transactions, make changes to their insurance, keep track of medical records, or even buy groceries—and they expect instant response times from 24×7 service availability. Minimizing downtime, whether planned or unplanned, can mean the difference between delighting customers and losing them to competitors.

Proactive root-cause analysis to address performance issues before they occur

Whether in mainframe operations or everyday life, an informed, proactive approach is preferable to reactive “firefighting.” Waiting for issues to develop, seeking out their root causes, and then working to resolve them costs the business precious time and leaves you vulnerable to even more significant delays if further problems develop.

“BMC saves me time performing day-to-day tasks by proactively driving to root-cause analysis. The automation and intelligence that the product is giving us helps us make decisions in a timely manner.”

—Technical support manager, insurance

Knowing what caused previous issues, looking for warning signs, and working to prevent those issues gives you a clear advantage. Operations teams that use manual processes and rely on several monitoring solutions can easily miss not only warning signs but also active issues, leading to costly outages and extended resolution times. And it’s nearly impossible for operators, regardless of their experience, to keep track of past issues and their causes while simultaneously monitoring and analyzing multiple environments for similar trends.

BMC AMI Ops Monitoring helps avoid these situations by analyzing both historical and real-time data, all in a single view. Armed with the knowledge of conditions that have led to issues in the past, as well as the ability to monitor for the recurrence of these conditions, it informs operations teams that trouble is brewing, allowing them to reallocate resources and work to fix problems before they even happen. Combined with a real-time view of critical resources and usage metrics across multiple mainframe environments, this gives teams unprecedented visibility into system health.

No amount of monitoring will prevent every issue, though. When problems do arise, BMC AMI Ops Monitoring doesn’t leave teams guessing. Providing guided navigation to the source of the issues helps teams identify problem components and processes and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Ensuring high performance

Even when things work normally, mainframe operations teams are busy maximizing resource usage efficiency while keeping costs low and maintaining maximum availability. They can’t rely on traditional slow periods, such as overnight hours or weekends, to conduct maintenance or fine-tune their systems. As transaction and data volume increase and become more unpredictable, they must adjust their practices to ensure maximum uptime and customer satisfaction.

“With BMC AMI Ops Monitoring, it’s a one-stop-shop, comprehensive solution. We can use this on one console rather than using a combination of [point solution], some in-house functionality, and other systems. It’s allowed us to streamline our staff and put certain people in charge of certain functionality in a way that we were unable to before. It’s improved efficiency a great deal.”

—VP of operations, financial services

By offering real-time monitoring and a single point of control for multiple systems, BMC AMI Ops Monitoring empowers operations teams to reallocate resources, adjust parameters, and make system changes without costly downtime. This standardized, single-view system also helps onboard new team members faster and empowers less-experienced operators, improving workforce efficiency and simplifying monitoring to deliver additional cost savings.

A positive impact

As shown in the study, the enhanced visibility, actionable insights, and increased efficiency offered by BMC AMI Ops Monitoring not only lead to improved system availability but also help streamline operations and reduce costs, positively impacting your organization’s bottom line and your customers’ satisfaction.

To learn more about the quantified and unquantified benefits of adoption and see more of the findings, read The Total Economic Impact™ of BMC AMI Ops Monitoring.

The Modern Mainframe podcast recently sat down with John McKenny, BMC Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation, and April Hickel, Vice President of Intelligent Z Strategy, for a three-part discussion on mainframe DevOps, based on what John and April are seeing in their interactions with BMC customers. The conversation covered topics ranging from where companies are on their mainframe DevOps journeys, the tools they’re using, the benefits and challenges involved, and what’s coming in the future.

One thread that carried throughout the conversation was the idea that mainframe DevOps is not being handled as a platform-specific activity; organizations are including the mainframe in their overall enterprise DevOps efforts. Part of this approach is the realization that, as the demand for more digital services and faster innovation grows, organizations can only be as fast as the slowest link in their software development chain. As an increasing number of multi-platform applications are developed and the mainframe is depended upon for its ability to quickly and efficiently process high volumes of transactions, the platform must be an equal participant in enterprise DevOps.

The success organizations have seen in adoption of DevOps on other platforms and the availability of modern tools that support the mainframe help drive this mentality. April points out that priorities have shifted, with DevOps now including all components of an application. She says, “I’m hearing more and more executives say, ‘We want to use the same DevOps pipelines. We want to share the approach. We’re managing our applications more holistically than ever as we strive to deliver customer service, so we’ve stopped thinking about [the] platform where the application workload is hosted as the decision of…what is developed in a modern way and what isn’t, and we’ve started to think about the priority of the application.'”

Still, some organizations are hesitant to implement the new tooling and processes required to integrate the mainframe with their DevOps toolchains. John recommends that IT leaders who are still unsure of the benefits first look at the success stories of organizations that rapidly reaped the benefits of DevOps deployment and then consider what their own organizations can achieve with the capabilities afforded by a mainframe-inclusive DevOps toolchain. Overall, he says, the decision comes down to leadership teams’ recognition of those benefits and the belief that they can implement DevOps in their own organizations.

“Believe. It can be done,” he says. “There are ways to overcome and get around any obstacle that you may face, and there are plenty of support systems out there to help you, within your own organization, in the communities around DevOps, and with vendors like BMC—we’d love to help you.”

Listen to the entire “Mainframe DevOps Transformation” conversation on The Modern Mainframe podcast:

• Part 1: Progress, Measurement, and Tools
• Part 2: Benefits, Challenges, and Getting Started
• Part 3: Operations, Bridging the Gap, and a Look Forward

As more organizations utilize value stream mapping as part their DevOps journeys, it has become clear that value streams include not only systems of engagement, but systems of record as well, often containing complex dependencies involving the mainframe. Understanding and managing these dependencies is crucial for companies looking to continuously improve the quality, velocity, and efficiency of their enterprise software delivery.

Continuous feedback is crucial to this continuous improvement; organizations must be able to make informed decisions based on actionable data. Luckily, there are tools available that can provide this data and help organizations maximize their value streams. Key metrics, like those tracked by BMC AMI zAdviser​, provide valuable insight into what is being done right in software delivery pipelines and help identify bottlenecks and other constraints. Value stream management tools, like Plutora, give further actionable insight into enterprise-wide application delivery through continuous monitoring and feedback.

On May 19 at 1 pm ET, DevOps.com will present the Plutora-sponsored webinar, “Why Aren’t Mainframes a Part of Your Value Streams?” BMC DevOps Architect Stuart Ashby will join Plutora Vice President of Product Jeff Keyes to discuss why mainframes should be a component of your overall software development process and steps you can take to include the platform in your value streams.

The webinar will cover:

• How value stream management can give you unprecedented software delivery insights
• How to overcome the challenges of managing multiple development methodologies
• How multi-speed development can continue with full dependency management
• Recommended practices for orienting your value streams to include your mainframes

Overall, the webinar seeks to explain why the mainframe is critical to enterprise value stream management and how you can deliver more customer value and drive growth by making your mainframe applications part of your value stream. As Ashby states, “Any enterprises that have a mainframe cannot ignore the importance of their systems of record in their end-to-end value streams.”

Overview: East Carolina University Adjunct Professor Dr. Cameron Seay recently joined the Modern Mainframe podcast to talk about his career, his efforts to raise the profile of the mainframe in college curricula, how to attract new students to the platform, and more.

The issue of replacing talent replacement is well known in the mainframe community. As many developers and other mainframe professionals approach retirement age organizations are facing increasing pressure to find, train, and retain new talent—the 2020 BMC Mainframe Survey shows that staffing and skills are a top priority for 46% of respondents. The simple fact, though, is that most college and university information technology programs place little, if any emphasis on the platform. But some professors, seeing the career opportunities mainframe affords their students, are championing the platform and working to spread awareness among students and faculty alike.

I recently interviewed one such champion, East Carolina University Adjunct Professor Dr. Cameron Seay, for the Modern Mainframe podcast. A 2020 IBM Z Champion, Dr. Seay is vocal about the opportunities offered by the mainframe and the platform’s importance to the digital economy.

The problem, he says, is not with perception of the mainframe on campus, but with its visibility. According to Dr. Seay, once students learn of the prevalence of the mainframe “The mainframe is invisible on the college campuses,” he says. “The college students do not know about this technology. When they learn about it, they love it.”

Dr. Seay has been involved in a number of projects to help increase exposure to the mainframe on campus. In addition to helping IBM develop an apprenticeship model and holding an online Q&A session with Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley last June, he is working with colleagues to write a mainframe textbook, which he hopes can be used to include the mainframe in more college curricula. He is planning a mainframe bootcamp at Tennessee State University this January and working to establish a standardized class which can be taught to students at different universities at the same time.

“That is my mission,” he says, “to raise awareness of this among colleges.”

Overview: Robert Morris University’s Dr. J. Packy Laverty explains that a type of salesmanship helps increase awareness of the mainframe among college students. Corporate involvement at the high school and college levels, he says, is needed to introduce the mainframe to students and champion its merits as a critical computing platform and appealing career choice.

The shortage of new mainframe developers is well-known. Professionals who have worked on the platform for decades are increasingly reaching retirement age, leaving companies searching for replacements. While this is happening, years of misplaced promises of the mainframe’s demise have made fewer schools concentrate on the mainframe and fewer students interested in careers. Bridging this gap is crucial to survival as the mainframe cements its role as the backbone of the digital economy.

In May 2020 I interviewed Eastern Carolina Adjunct Professor Dr. Cameron Seay about his advocacy for the mainframe and the career opportunities it offers. He explained that while the mainframe is “invisible” on campus, students exposed to COBOL and mainframe computing are willing to consider careers on the platform. Increasing student awareness and having more employers recruit on campus, he said, are key to meeting the challenge of replacing mainframe talent.

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Robert Morris University (RMU) professor Dr. J. Packy Laverty about COBOL and the mainframe on campus, and how more students can be enticed to choose careers on the mainframe.

Originally an accounting, finance, and economics professor, “Packy,” as he prefers to be called, was asked to begin teaching computer classes in 1979 when a dean learned that he had purchased a Radio Shack Model I personal computer. In a career spanning 44 years, he has taught at University of Pittsburgh, St. Vincent’s College and other schools, and is currently a Professor of Computer Information Systems at RMU. In addition to working with IBM’s Z System Academic Initiative and Master the Mainframe, he is an Education Special Interest Group (EDSIG) Distinguished Fellow.

Awareness

In Dr. Laverty’s opinion, the first obstacle to recruiting mainframe talent from college is awareness. “No high school student or freshmen ever came to Robert Morris that said they want to work on a mainframe. There is zero awareness.”

The responsibility for raising awareness is shared. “The first thing you need to do,” he says, “is to get awareness at the high school level and awareness among the faculty.” While programs like IBM’s Master the Mainframe engage high school and college students in a fun learning environment, companies should also look to sponsor high school programs and speak face-to-face with college faculty at education conferences.

Internship programs and even company-sponsored scholarships will also help increase awareness of the mainframe careers that are available. Last year, according to Dr. Laverty, a Pittsburgh-based bank offered an internship for RMU students who were willing to learn COBOL. “So,” he says, “the employers are doing interesting things out there.”

But faculty must also help raise awareness in the student body. According to Dr. Laverty, one secret to RMU’s success in developing mainframe talent was former Computer and Information Systems (CIS) Department Chair John Turchek, who would speak to every incoming freshman CIS student and their parents about the opportunity presented by the mainframe.

Dr. Laverty says, “Well, how did he convert these people over? Because the parents were with them. The parents were working with a company that had a mainframe. ‘Johnny, Sally, you’re going to take one course in the mainframe, just try it out.’ You can’t do that by having somebody search on the internet. He talked to probably 200 students each year, either active students or graduate incoming students.”

This personal level of attention and what Dr. Laverty calls “salesmanship” helped draw students to a platform they may not have even known was in existence.

COBOL: Just Another Computer Language

A common criticism of COBOL is that it is an antiquated language, difficult for students who may be more accustomed to languages like Java or C. Dr. Laverty says that the key to overcoming this obstacle is to point out analogous facets of each language. “Students are not accustomed to text-based systems,” he says. “You need the analogies to talk with today’s students.”

All programming languages are the same. What is a data division in COBOL? It’s the exact same thing that you do in C, C# and other languages. You declare the variables in the data types, it’s no different.

“This is where AMI DevX excels….You’ve got to take what they are familiar with,” he continues, “the holes that they are familiar with and take it out of the COBOL atmosphere…. If you can program in any single language, I can easily teach you COBOL…. Anybody can learn COBOL. Anybody who has the desire can teach COBOL to today’s students. There’s no question in my mind.”

The Curriculum

Once students are interested and can relate to COBOL, a strong mainframe curriculum helps them prepare for a variety of careers. RMU gives students the opportunity to choose the mainframe as their five-course area of interest for the Computer Information Systems degree, or to bolster their skillset with any of the five mainframe courses or Enterprise Systems undergraduate and graduate certificates.

While many mainframe students from RMU go on to work at Pittsburgh-area banks, according to Dr. Laverty familiarity with the mainframe opens other doors. “We have somebody who went with cyber security from the government. We have an accounting major who graduated last year. He went into auditing mainframes because he had a mainframe course, but he wanted to get his CPA. He got retooled. It’s crazy, you know, with the shortage and the demand, you’ve just got to know where to look.”

The Future

RMU students learn directly on the college’s mainframe, a system used by eight other colleges. Dr. Laverty is working with schools like New York’s Farmingdale State College and Bethany College of West Virginia to develop mainframe curricula because he recognizes the incredible potential the platform offers for valuable and rewarding careers. The mainframe, he says, “is the best thing that has happened to my students. I’m not doing it for me. I’m doing it for my students.”

And those students have excelled.

“Seven years ago, I had four students who talked at the Pittsburgh SHARE conference. Last summer, I had 12 students who presented at the Pittsburgh SHARE conference. And they were great. Every one of them, they are better than I am. And as an educator it doesn’t get better than that.”

Dr. Laverty can be reached at laverty@rmu.edu.

Overview: As Rick Slade discusses in his podcast series, organizations should approach their software delivery processes just as they would any other critical business system. An efficient, effective software delivery system is a crucial part of not just keeping pace with your competitors but becoming a leader in your marketplace.

We recently wrapped up the Building a Better Software Development Platform podcast series. Through 15 episodes, Executive DevOps Solution Architect Rick Slade made the case for treating your software delivery as a critical business system and explained the steps needed to make it as efficient and productive as possible by incorporating Agile and DevOps methodologies. I recently talked to Rick about how he thinks the series will help listeners, why the subject is important, and the experience of creating a podcast based on his years of experience.

MD: What should be the biggest takeaway for listeners of this series?

Rick: For me, the big takeaway is changing the mindset of how you manage software delivery within your organization. It’s not a set of disjointed tools and processes. If done properly, and if operating effectively, it is a system.

The software delivery system is a symphony of tools working together to produce a desired output.

We need to start to look at the software delivery ecosystem as a critical business system, and it needs to be managed accordingly. And that means looking at things differently. If you’ve got disjointed tools and disjointed processes, you’re going to have multiple ways of doing things and it’s going to be difficult to manage effectiveness and quality of output.

If you’ve got an application that is critical to your business and you manage it as such, you’re going to be more efficient and more effective. “Efficient” meaning that we maximize the output of our efforts, and “effective” meaning producing great output. Both are important in a modern organization’s desire to deliver software. We’ve got to be both of those things in order to meet marketplace demands and in order to compete with our competitors.

MD: What would you tell someone who is on the fence about whether to make the investments needed to build a new software delivery system?

Rick: I think you have to look at it from a financial standpoint. You have to understand, you have to be honest with yourself with regard to where you are in comparison to your peers in the industry. And are you losing market share? Are you being as competitive as you could be? Are you not leading the market because of your inability to get software solutions to the people who are going to use them?

An honest self-assessment of where you are should dictate a desire to change. Change is the only way that you’re going to accomplish those goals. And it starts with self-awareness and a desire to understand how effective or ineffective you are. And the best way to do that is through metrics and measurement. Use that information to self-assess, look at how you’re doing, as compared to others. With that information a decision whether to invest becomes much easier.

MD: So, using something like Compuware zAdviser is really a kind of first step in the process?

Rick: Yes. It will help you establish a benchmark. Creating a benchmark is a great first step and zAdviser can help you do that faster and, I think, more effectively.

MD: When did the idea of DevOps on the mainframe start gaining some traction?

Rick: I came to IBM in 2007 and it was being talked about. DevOps should not be the goal of an investment strategy. The goal is to deliver better software faster. “DevOps” is just a label assigned to a framework, or a culture, to accomplish that. The desire to deliver software better… I started in the ’70s, and we were talking about application design, we were talking about tooling when I was 22 years old, out of college. So, it’s been talked about forever and will continue to be.

MD: So, it will keep evolving.

Rick: It will. It’s been evolving for the 40 years I’ve been involved in the business, and it’s constantly changing. Why are we to think that it won’t continue to do so? And if it is going to continue to change, and you do believe that it is mission-critical to your organization—and who doesn’t think software delivery is mission-critical these days—then why should you not have dedicated people and start to manage it as a critical system within your organization?

It’s a critical value stream within your organization. A value stream is those critical operations that an organization executes in order to better service its customers, or its employees, or its constituents. The software delivery efforts within an organization, I think, are a critical value stream and we should be managing it the same way that we manage our other critical value streams.

MD: We’re not talking about putting a new system in place and leaving it for 30 years, we’re talking about something that will grow, or change.

Rick: That’s exactly right. It needs to be a system and it needs to be built on an architecture that supports evolution. That’s why I’m such a believer in the open software delivery model. I want a system where I can mix and match parts, but I can also exchange parts for others that are evolved and even better. Because things are going to get better. Compuware doesn’t stand still. IBM doesn’t stand still. We’re always providing new capabilities and features. And so, you want a software delivery system that can accept or adopt those changes as quickly as possible so to positively impact your own software delivery value stream within your organization.

MD: Does the series need to be listened to as a whole in order to be effective? Can individual episodes help listeners who may be at different stages in the modernization of their software delivery systems?

Rick: I think they can. But I think it’s most effective if you look at it as a book. I was talking to [Compuware Vice President, Product Management] Sam Knutson the other day and he said, “I love what you guys did with the podcast. It’s like an audiobook, and it tells a great story.” So, it’s quite effective if you consume the whole thing, but I certainly believe that there are topics you can extract, like testing and automation, that are applicable and usable without going through the entire series.

MD: What did you learn in doing the podcast?

Rick: I learned some things about myself. I learned that I don’t know as much as I thought I knew, but also that I know more than I thought I did. I was able to cover a lot of topics with my own knowledge, but as I dug deeper into those topics, I found that there’s still a lot to be learned.

I think another lesson learned is it’s best if you’ve got passion for what you’re talking about. You’ve got to care about your subject. You can’t be successful without being passionate.

You can find the Building a Better Software Delivery Platform series, as well as other mainframe-related content, in the Modern Mainframe podcast.

Overview: East Carolina University Adjunct Professor, Dr. Cameron Seay, talks about the mainframe on campus, how to get more students interested in the platform, and his virtual event with Chris O’Malley, CEO of Compuware, a BMC Company.

The looming shortage of skilled mainframe developers is well documented. In this environment, it is imperative that the next generation of developers is made aware of the mainframe, not as a dying legacy platform, but as an advanced, exciting system that powers the world’s economy.

Dr. Cameron Seay, Technology Systems adjunct professor at East Carolina University, knows this all too well. For the past 15 years, he has championed the mainframe as a vital computing platform and as a means for students to differentiate themselves as they enter the workforce. A 2020 IBM Z Champion, he became especially interested in the mainframe after seeing a presentation by Don Resnik, former head of the IBM Mainframe Academic Initiative, and feeling that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) should embrace it as a worthwhile career path.

I spoke with Dr. Seay recently about the mainframe on campus, students’ reception of it as a career choice and his online Q&A session, Coffee with Dr. Cameron Seay and CEO Chris O’Malley.

Q: Do you think anything has changed regarding the way mainframe and COBOL are presented in colleges since you started teaching in 2004?

Dr. Seay: Sad to say, not really. I don’t see too much has changed. I really don’t. It’s just invisible in the college culture. It’s not a technology that anyone knows anything about—any appreciable numbers, that is.

Q: So, you’re trying to change that?

Dr. Seay: Doing the best I can. And it’s not that hard to change; I’ve done this at five schools and I’ve never had a problem explaining this to the students. It’s never been an issue. The students are not a problem. The students particularly, but not exclusively, at HBCUs are looking for a future. They’re looking for anything that they can sink their teeth into, that’s going to pay them money and help them pay back their student loans. And mainframe is it. Is every student attracted to it? No, there are some students that want to kind of do the Google-y, Apple-y kind of stuff and that’s fine. But I would say I’ve only had a few of those who told me, “No, I’m not interested in this, whatsoever.” The other 95%, whether they do or do not go into this, are willing to at least consider it as a career option.

Q: How do you think you can get students more interested in the mainframe as a career?

Dr. Seay: Just expose them to it. They’re not hearing about it. They don’t know anything about it. Events like the one coming up with Chris O’Malley are an opportunity to expose them to mainframe technology.

Q: What do you want students to take from Coffee with Dr. Cameron Seay and CEO Chris O’Malley?

Dr. Seay: First of all, I want the students to see Chris O’Malley—see that there’s somebody in this space who is a champion for this technology. That’s what I want them to see. And I want them to understand the basics. We need to explain that this is how the world does business. Globally, 70 to 80% of business transactions go on a mainframe. Without the mainframe, you don’t have a global economy, as we know it. So those are some of the things that I want to come through. I don’t want their eyes to glaze over, I just want to give them a few points to think about. That yes, this is important, and you can get in on the ground floor on this. And that you can learn this stuff when most of the world doesn’t know anything about it and it will pay you good money.

I want to explain to them that for both sides of the coin, both the systems world and the developers’ world, COBOL is a great language to learn. It’s easy to learn. And it’s not either/or.

One of the things I want to get through is that this is not mainframe or cloud, it’s mainframe and cloud.

The mainframe is as much about philosophy and culture as it is about technology. It’s a way of thinking about computation, it’s a way of thinking about design. And so, you think about problems differently than X86 people do, because you’re not going to waste cycles. X86 people don’t worry about wasted cycles, because they’ve got cycles to waste. On the mainframe, every cycle is precious, because we try to do this stuff as efficiently as is humanly possible. It’s just a different way of thinking. And people get that—everybody in this space understands that, and it’s second nature to them.

Q: Is there anything you think employers can do to help spread the word about the mainframe amongst students?

Dr. Seay: They need to work with the career services people of universities in their area and just let them know, “Look, if you’ve got these skills, we want to hire you,” because the students don’t know that. So, the companies need to let folks know that this is an area where there’s a need.

Overview: Dave Kartzman, Compuware Solution Consultant and COBOL Migration Expert, talks about the role of planning in migration to COBOL V6 and how companies can make the move easily and efficiently.

Solution Consultant Dave Kartzman has experience with COBOL dating to 1973. As a member of Compuware Field Technical Support, he acted as an interface with beta testers of COBOL versions 5.1.0 and 5.1.1, ensuring that Compuware products supported the latest versions of COBOL on day one of their general release. Over years of working with clients as they migrated to COBOL V5 and now V6, Dave has accrued a wealth of knowledge which he has compiled into a presentation that has grown with his experience. Over the past 4 years, he has presented this information over 100 times to companies around the world to aid in their migration efforts.

Dave recently hosted a webcast entitled, “Moving to COBOL V6? Here’s What You Need to Know,” where he gave a brief overview of his migration presentation. We talked with Dave about COBOL V6 and how these presentations can help organizations effectively plan their migrations.

Q: When you give your presentation, where in the migration process are most of the companies? What kind of help are they looking for?

DK: Most of them are in the planning process. It isn’t that they need help, it’s that they need some guidance. The migration guide is almost 400 pages and it looks pretty intimidating, so there’s a lot of reticence and fear as to what they have to do. “How do I get started?” And once they get started, it’s normally not bad at all. And in fact, most clients will not recompile everything because it’s a nightmare to test your intermediate results and final results. It just does not work well that way.

Q: How does your presentation help companies with their migration?

DK: The whole intent of this is to get you migrated with the least amount of pain possible. And that’s been my goal all along—and how this whole thing came about—is to work with and pick up information that our clients have told us and try to come in with a presentation that is as complete as humanly possible within an hour and a half to two hours; what needs to be done and what you need to focus on when you’re doing your migration.

Keep it simple. Don’t overthink it. Use your standard development methodology and run with it and plan properly—that’s the key. If you don’t plan properly, it will be a nightmare. If they’ve planned properly virtually every client that I’ve worked with that’s migrated, it’s been a relatively smooth process. That’s not to say that there aren’t issues; there are things that come up as part of their programming that they didn’t realize. They thought that running the new version of COBOL, they shouldn’t have any issues. Well, occasionally you run into issues and it’s just constraints. Things that are different between version 4 and version 6.

Q: Is there a lot of downtime associated with migration?

DK: No, not at all. It depends upon the approach you take. The approach that we espouse is to take a single business unit application and all the programs that are in there and run the analysis as to what programs would be best suited to migrate to the new versions of COBOL. Test, convert them, recompile them, test them thoroughly, and use tools to monitor the performance impact. So, you at least benchmark some of the savings that you should expect to receive.

And then once you move that business unit into production, once you finish your pilot and you keep notes, you have a post-mortem so that the next business unit will take what you went through and build on that so that with each successive group of units it becomes easier and easier because you’ve basically kept from reinventing the wheel.

Once a business unit is moved over to the new version, then their compiled procedures no longer use the old version of COBOL. They only use the new version for any maintenance or new development. Bearing that in mind, you have concurrent development going on at the same time that you’re doing migrations. So, there is no downtime.

Q: You mentioned using tools when testing. What are the best tools to use?

DK: In order to analyze the load libraries or program object libraries, we have a utility within File-AID that’s called the load module analysis. It’s option 3.1 in the File-AID MVS screen—it’s part of the basic product and the user has the ability to go in and specify the name of a library or a program object library and generate a CSV file that they can upload to Excel and, using the filters, basically show every member in that library, all of the CSECTS of those individual program load modules and, in the case of COBOL modules, the compile options as well as a release of COBOL that they were compiled under. This is really important because if you have OS/VS COBOL and VS COBOL II programs, you really have to check those to make sure that they will work in the new environment.

The other one is using Strobe. If you want to monitor their performance, like if you have the same test bed under 4.2 and you run it under 4.2 and another one under 6.3, you can run Strobe measurements on both of those and you have the ability to go in and compare the savings. So, it gives you the opportunity to look at the difference in what the potential savings are and maybe benchmark what you’re hoping to achieve out of it. We have no products to sell in these presentations. Everything that we do to assist the clients is already embedded within our tools. We provide day one support for all the versions of COBOL.

Q: COBOL V4’s end-of-service date is September 30, 2021. Are you seeing an increased urgency to upgrade to V6? (Editor’s note: Since publication of this article, IBM has pushed the end of service date for COBOL V4.2.0 to April 30, 2022)

DK: I’ve done 108 of these presentations now in the last four and a half years and there is more emergency in the last year because people are realizing that that September 2021 date is coming up. And again, they can still run 4.2 but if they run into any issues, they know they need to go to V6 because their costs keep going up. If they’re doing Rolling 4-Hour Average and their business continues to go well, it’s going to keep bumping up how much more money they have to spend. So, by going to V6, they’re going to be able to save money by converting, over time, more and more of their applications and reducing their Rolling 4-Hour Average or getting a better price under Tailor Fit Pricing. So, there is a rush to go to it.

I’ve done presentations worldwide and it’s been great. The customers appreciated it. It costs them two hours of their time, but they get the PowerPoint presentation and a lot of information that they can take back and start using as part of their migration process. So, they’re not starting from scratch. What I’m doing is providing just a stepping-stone for them to start, to make them aware of things they need to pay attention to. The IBM migration guide is just a fabulous manual that is 400 pages and I’m just touching on the things that they really need to pay attention to and give them a start.