The mainframe is a unique platform, capable of handling an incredible volume of transactions while maintaining unmatched reliability and uptime. But treating the platform as a separate entity, siloed away from your IT environment with separate tools and strategies, not only isn’t necessary, it places you at a competitive disadvantage. That said, integrating siloed mainframe processes and practices with the rest of their IT ecosystem has been a challenge for CIOs and CISOs.
One goal of the BMC AMI portfolio is to extend the intelligence of your mainframe environment into the broader IT ecosystem – and vice versa – bridging the gap between x86, cloud, and mainframe strategies to create a consistent enterprise-level approach to security, operations, and application development and delivery.
To this end, in our April 2025 release of enhancements to the BMC AMI portfolio, we addressed the increased use of Java® on the mainframe by extending Java support across the full application development lifecycle. New automated exception handling for Java applications in BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID pairs with BMC AMI Strobe Java performance monitoring capabilities (introduced in January) to empower developers to confidently take advantage of the language’s “write once, run anywhere” capability on the mainframe.
Also introduced in April was an extension to the BMC AMI DevOps for Db2® Universal Connector which added GitLab support to existing integrations with Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions, enabling seamless integration with enterprise DevOps strategies.
In our July release, new security and cloud-based data management enhancements continue the prioritization of mainframe integration and compatibility with enterprise-level tools and solutions.
Enterprise-level multi-factor authentication
Okta is a leader in multi-factor authentication (MFA), used across the IT industry to guard against credential-based threats. With the new BMC AMI Enterprise Connector for Okta, security teams can employ the same MFA solution for X86-based servers, cloud-based services, and the mainframe with a single solution, enabling them to manage MFA across the enterprise from a single endpoint, or even employ MFA on the mainframe for the first time.
BMC AMI Enterprise Connector for Okta joins our enterprise connectors for Illumio (to manage Zero Trust service visibility) and Venafi (to manage machine identity management) across the enterprise.
Streamlined transfer of large data sets
Speaking of MFA, a new enhancement in BMC AMI Cloud enables mainframe administrators to enforce password and IBM® zMFA token entry for login and high-risk operations like restore, alter, and delete, to protect on-premises object storage and public cloud object storage data from unauthorized access.
In addition to the benefits of enhanced security, the flexibility of BMC AMI Cloud to integrate with your choice of storage vendors enables organizations to align mainframe data storage more closely with enterprise hybrid storage strategies. An enhancement included in the July release makes it even easier to store large amounts of mainframe data across on-premises object storage and public cloud object storage.
New multi-volume support in the Cloud Data Sets (CDS) feature of BMC AMI Cloud Data enables the generation of larger CDSs–up to 255 terabytes–by treating multiple cloud objects as a single, logical dataset. This enhanced CDS size helps streamline backup, archive, and recovery without increasing complexity.
Enhanced productivity insights
Users of BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise are well aware of its ability to help development teams continuously improve the quality, speed, and efficiency of their software delivery. BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise collects data from BMC AMI DevX solutions and presents it as DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics with comparisons against mainframe-specific KPIs.
Given the increase in usage of Git for mainframe source control management, BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise can now collect Git usage data to further enhance its DORA metrics and KPIs and help application development leaders identify bottlenecks and other potential issues.
Sharing mainframe knowledge
We’ve discussed the advantages of integrating the mainframe with enterprise-level tooling, but breaking down a siloed approach to the platform provides another key benefit: an empowered workforce. For decades, work on the mainframe has been done by platform-dedicated professionals, requiring a good deal of time and experience to achieve needed expertise. As new talent is introduced to the mainframe and the use of cross-platform professionals increases, bridging the experience gap has become a necessity.
This July, we’re partnering with clients as part of a managed beta program for a new feature in BMC AMI Assistant: the ability to chat with a mainframe expert. This feature can turn every user into a mainframe expert in an instant, providing an AI-powered knowledge expert that answers users’ questions in an easy to read and understand format.
Drawing on your organization’s accumulated expertise, ingested from manuals, internal documents, support ticket data and more, it’s like having a personal mentor for each user—an expert who can instantly answer questions and provide guidance to users regardless of their own level of experience.
You’ve never mainframed like this
I’ve covered only a portion of the enhancements introduced this July, but these and all of our new features are designed to optimize your organization’s mainframe capabilities and integrate the platform with your enterprise IT strategies. Rather than a siloed, parallel environment, our goal is to make the mainframe a leader in showing what is possible across your enterprise technology ecosystem.
To learn more about what’s included in the BMC AMI July 2025 release, visit the What’s New in Mainframe Solutions webpage.
