The modern mainframe is a key piece of the enterprise IT ecosystem. As I’ve written in the past, to realize the mainframe’s—and your organization’s—true potential, it cannot be a operated as a siloed entity, isolated from the rest of your IT environment through the use of separate tools, processes, and strategies. This is especially true today, as the mainframe workforce undergoes a demographic shift and a new generation of talent brings modern tooling and methods to the platform.
This quarter’s release of enhancements to the BMC AMI portfolio helps users facilitate the platform’s inclusion in enterprise observability efforts, enable developers to understand, refactor, and convert COBOL code into Java, and gain better insight into how database administrators (DBAs) are using BMC products within their systems—all while accelerating mainframe transformation with the power of generative AI (GenAI).
Enhanced observability with OpenTelemetry metrics
To gain a full view of efficiency and availability across the IT ecosystem, enterprise operations teams must be able to correlate performance across both mainframe and distributed systems. Compiling data from separate observability tools for each system into a unified, view can be expensive, inefficient, and difficult, especially among more complex environments.
This quarter’s addition of OpenTelemetry (OTel) metric streaming from BMC AMI Datastream for Ops into enterprise observability tools like Elastic, Splunk, Grafana, Datadog, and BMC Helix gives teams a broader, more holistic view of performance across enterprise systems. This enables them to take a proactive approach to issue prevention and react more quickly when issues do occur.
The BMC AMI Ops user experience is further enhanced by the new BMC AMI Assistant knowledge expert, which allows users to access expert mainframe knowledge, digested from trusted BMC documentation and internal subject matter expert articles without leaving the workflow. This GenAI-powered chat gives clear, relevant guidance without the need to search through documentation or manuals. By putting this valuable information at their fingertips, BMC AMI Assistant can save experienced users time, help onboard new talent faster, and bridge mainframe skills gaps.
Meanwhile, new interactive dashboard capabilities enhance BMC AMI Ops single-pane-of-glass visibility. New severity-based gauge and metric panels, hybrid visualizations, drill-through navigation to origin views, in-context actions, diagnostic paths, and soft capping and storage KPIs empower users to customize layouts for quick access without the leaving the dashboard.
Understand. Refactor. Transform.
Results of the 2025 BMC Mainframe Survey show that the use of Java on the mainframe is increasing, with 60 percent of respondents reporting it as one of the four most frequently used languages on the platform and 51 percent reporting that they are rewriting applications into Java.
The GenAI-powered benefits of BMC AMI Assistant help development teams modernize codebases by fully understanding, organizing, and transforming pieces of code. Within BMC AMI DevX Code Insights, BMC AMI Assistant translates COBOL business logic into plain English explanations, providing full context around what code does and why it was written.
This knowledge helps developers decide which pieces of code might benefit most from refactoring and, again with BMC AMI Assistant, break monolithic COBOL programs down into clean, modular components.
This full understanding of code’s business logic and how applications are structured enables developers to make informed decisions on whether a particular piece of code should remain in COBOL or would be better suited with conversion into Java®. With a full understanding of code’s business logic and more structured modular code units, developers can then decide the right language for a given module’s job.
New selective code conversion empowers developers to select COBOL modules and use BMC AMI Assistant to convert them to Java. This transformation helps preserve system stability with code modules that are well-documented, include proper error handling, and follow object-oriented programming design patterns.
Data enhancements improve mainframe resilience
Database administrators can now view interactive reports across systems, users, and timeframes in a single interface with new Runtime Insights in BMC AMI Command Center for Db2. With the ability to view overall activity and drill into specific executions, these reports give DBAs better insight into how certain IBM® Db2® functions and technologies are being used across their environments, enabling them to boost productivity and strategically optimize their Db2 environments.
For IMS™ environments, the new Point-in-Time Recon Restoration function in BMC AMI Data for IMS gives DBAs the ability to rebuild RECON datasets to an exact point in time, ensuring recovery accuracy and minimizing downtime. The auditable point-in-time recovery capabilities also help organizations comply with the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) mandates and ensure operational continuity.
A commitment to innovation
Coupled with seamless support of IBM® z/OS 3.2, this quarter’s enhancements improve system observability, enable intelligent modernization of code bases, and improve resilience while continuing our strategic integration of GenAI capabilities into BMC AMI solutions. As always, we are committed to providing your organization with the solutions you need to meet and exceed your customers’ expectations.
To learn more about everything included in the BMC AMI October 2025 release, visit the What’s New in Mainframe Solutions webpage.
