BMC Finalizes Compuware Acquisition

On June 1 BMC completed its acquisition of Compuware. Both were leading mainframe independent software vendors (ISV) and leading providers of mainframe application development, delivery, and performance solutions. Recently the mainframe ISV space has picked up the action. Just a week ago DancingDinosaur was writing about the renaming of Syncsort to Precisely after completing its acquisition of Pitney Bowes, a company best known for its postage metering.

Given IBM’s lackluster performance as a mainframe software application vendor, albeit somewhat constrained by legalities, a healthy mainframe ISV market is good for everyone that wants to thrive in the mainframe space. And there are others DancingDinosaur hasn’t covered recently, such as DataKinetics, a mainframe performance and optimization provider, and Software Diversified Services (SDS), which specializes in mainframe security.

In some ways DancingDinosaur is saddened that the number of independent mainframe ISVs has dropped by one, but is hopeful that those that remain are going to be stronger, more innovative, and better for the mainframe space overall. As BMC says in its announcement: Customers to benefit from an integrated DevOps toolchain with mainframe operations management and agile application development and delivery. Everybody with a stake in the mainframe space should wish them success.

As BMC puts it: the strategic combination of the two companies builds on the success of BMC’s Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) and Compuware’s Topaz suite, ISPW technology, and classic product portfolios to modernize mainframe environments. BMC with Compuware now enables automation and intelligent operations with agile development and delivery – empowering the next generation of mainframe developers and operations teams to excel when working with mainframe programming languages, applications, data, infrastructure, and security.

And the industry analysts say in the announcement: “Adding Compuware’s Topaz software development environment to the BMC portfolio is another step in the direction of targeting the enterprise developer. With Topaz, developers take a modern approach to building, testing, and deploying mainframe applications. This move should allow BMC to spread the word that modern tools matter for the mainframe engineer,” wrote Christopher Condo, Chris Gardner, and Diego Lo Giudice at Forrester Research.

In addition: fifty percent of respondents in a 2019 Forrester study reported that they plan to grow their use of the mainframe over the next two years and 93% of respondents in the 2019 BMC Mainframe Survey believe in the long-term and new workload strength of the platform.

For the mainframe shop, the newly unified portfolio will enable enterprises to:

• Leverage the processing power, stability, security, and agile scalability of the mainframe
• Scale Agile and DevOps methods with a fully integrated DevOps toolchain – allowing for mainframe applications to get to market more quickly and efficiently without compromising quality.
• Combine the self-analyzing, self-healing, and self-optimizing power of the BMC AMI suite of products to increase mainframe availability, efficiency, and security while mitigating risk; along with the Compuware Topaz suite, to empower the next generation of developers to build, analyze, test, deploy, and manage mainframe applications
• Create a customer experience to meet the business demands of the digital age – jumpstarting their Autonomous Digital Enterprise journey

BMC’s AMI brings an interesting twist. Specifically, it aims to leverage AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics to achieve a self-managing mainframe. Key elements of such a self-managing mainframe in the areas of security for advanced network and system security include improved adherence to PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, FISMA, GDPR, ISO 27001, IRS Pub. 1075, NERC, and other industry standards for protecting data. Most helpful should be BMC AMI for Security to execute out-of-the-box scorecards for frequently audited areas. 

Similarly, AMI can address areas like  capacity management to optimize mainframe capacity by addressing bottlenecks before they occur, boost staff productivity, and deliver a right-sized, cost-optimized mainframe environment. Or DevOps AMI for the mainframe through application orchestration tools to automatically capture database changes and communicate them to the database administrator (DBA) while enforcing DevOps best practices.

ISVs also can ignite a spark under IBM, especially now that it has Red Hat, as is the case of IBM enabling Wazi, a cloud native devop tool for the z. That’s why we want a strong ISV community.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at http://technologywriter.com/

Compuware Acquisition Boosts Mainframe DevOps

The acquisition of XaTester, new enhancements, and a partnership with Parasoft moves Compuware Topaz for Total Test toward leadership in the automated unit testing that has become essential for Agile and DevOps on the mainframe.  Compuware clearly has picked up its steady but languid quarterly pace of delivering new mainframe software. This comes on top of Topaz for Enterprise Data announced just a few weeks ago here.

Especially for mainframe shops, automated mainframe unit testing may present the biggest obstacle to speedy new code delivery.  The testing must not just be automated but continuous. As such, it serves as the centerpiece of the entire agile downstream process, which also includes continuous integration and continuous delivery. Only by delivering continuous automated testing can the mainframe shop deliver the no-fail quality of service for which it is heralded. Continuous automated testing is essential for controlling business risk, especially given the increased complexity and pace of modern application delivery.

To put it another way: building and integrating code changes is certainly important. However, if the automated delivery process cannot identify how changes impact business risk or disrupt the end-user experience continuous automated testing then increased frequency and speed of continuous Integration and continuous delivery becomes more of a problem than an advantage.

To deliver on its vision of Topaz for Total Test as the defacto standard for automating mainframe unit testing across all major mainframe environments and programming languages, Compuware has:

• Acquired XaTester from Xact Consulting A/S, enabling developers to quickly create unit tests for both batch and CICS-based programs written in COBOL, PL/I and Assembler

• Enhanced Topaz for Total Test to provide automated unit testing for IMS batch and transactional applications. Testing for IMS is especially important given that newer developers often have little or no hands-on experience with IMS code. This presents a challenge since more than 95 percent of the top Fortune 1000 companies use IMS to process more than 50 billion transactions a day and manage 15 million gigabytes of critical business data. Fortunately, IBM continues to add new features to IMS that help adjust to the changing IT world. These enhancements complement Topaz for Total Test’s existing support for batch applications written in COBOL.

• Partnered with Parasoft, a leading innovator in end-to-end test automation for software development. The first deliverable from the partnership is integration between Parasoft SOAtest and Topaz for Total Test. This integration enables developers working on mainframe applications to quickly and easily test API calls between mainframe and non-mainframe systems, an increasingly critical aspect of DevOps.

Topaz for Total Test transforms mainframe development by giving developers the same type of unit testing capabilities on the mainframe that distributed platform teams have become accustomed to on other platforms. Unit testing enables developers to find potential problems in their code as early as possible to more quickly and frequently deliver incremental changes in software functionality while more granularly documenting code for the benefit of other developers.

DevOps, also presents complications for the mainframe that come from its reputation for slow, painstaking, methodical release cycles. DevOps is about making sure the way an application is deployed in production is the same way it was deployed in test and development.

According to IBM writing in piece titled DevOps for the mainframe, notes DevOps also includes the notion of applying software management to the scripts and processes used for the actual deployment and monitoring and taking the monitoring capabilities from Operations into development and test to get an early understanding of how the system will actually perform.

As the IBM writers continue: In the z/OS environment, organizations are generally building only the changes, the deltas, to the application and deploying them into the environment.  It is very common to find that some parts of an application have not been rebuilt in decades. Worse yet, there are generally few z/OS test environments that are shared across application development teams.  The tools also are rarely the same tools used by the distributed teams.  These differences increase the difficultly of achieving an-end-to-end DevOps process.

This is where Compuware comes in. Topaz for Total Test fundamentally transforms mainframe development by giving developers the same type of unit testing capabilities on the mainframe they’ve become accustomed to on other platforms, mainly x86.

The result for large enterprises, Compuware continues, is a unified DevOps toolchain that accelerates development across all platforms so a multi-platform shop can more effectively compete in today’s rapidly-changing markets. “The new rules of the digital economy are putting pressure on our customers to achieve the utmost speed with the utmost quality,” said Luke Tuddenham, Vice President at CPT, a global IT consulting services firm with a significant testing practice. The new Topaz tools should The acquisition of XaTester, new enhancements, and a partnership with Parasoft moves Compuware Topaz for Total Test toward leadership in the automated unit testing that has become essential for Agile and DevOps on the mainframe. .

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com and here.

Compuware Expedites DevOps on Z

Compuware continues its quarterly introduction of new capabilities for the mainframe, a process that has been going on for several years by now. The latest advance, Topaz for Enterprise Data, promises to expedite the way DevOps teams can access the data they need while reducing the complexity, labor, and risk through extraction, masking, and visualization of the mainframe. The result: the ability to leverage all available data sources to deliver high-value apps and analytics fast.

Topaz for Enterprise Data expedites data access for DevOps

The days when mainframe shops could take a methodical and deliberate approach—painstakingly slow—to accessing enterprise data have long passed. Your DevOps teams need to dig the value out of that data and put it into the hands of managers and LOB teams fast, in hours, maybe just minutes so they can jump on even the most fleeting opportunities.

Fast, streamlined access to high-value data has become an urgent concern as businesses seek competitive advantages in a digital economy while fulfilling increasingly stringent compliance requirements. Topaz for Enterprise Data enables developers, QA staff, operations teams, and data scientists at all skill and experience levels to ensure they have immediate, secure access to the data they need, when they need it, in any format required.

It starts with data masking, which in just the last few months has become a critical concern with the rollout of GDPR across the EU. GDPR grants considerable protections and options to the people whose data your systems have been collecting. Now you need to protect personally identifiable information (PII) and comply with regulatory mandates like GDPR and whatever similar regs will come here.

Regs like these don’t apply just to your primary transaction data. You need data masking with all your data, especially when large, diverse datasets of high business value residing on the mainframe contain sensitive business or personal information.

This isn’t going to go away anytime soon so large enterprises must start transferring responsibility for the stewardship of this data to the next generation of DevOps folks who will be stuck with it. You can bet somebody will surely step forward and say “you have to change every instance of my data that contains this or that.” Even the most expensive lawyers will not be able to blunt such requests. Better to have the tools in place to respond to this quickly and easily.

The newest tool, according to Compuware, is Topaz for Enterprise Data. It will enable even a mainframe- inexperienced DevOps team to:

• Readily understand relationships between data even when they lack direct familiarity with specific data types or applications, to ensure data integrity and resulting code quality.
• Quickly generate data for testing, training, or business analytics purposes that properly and accurately represents actual production data.
• Ensure that any sensitive business or personal data extracted from production is properly masked for privacy and compliance purposes, while preserving essential data relationships and characteristics.
• Convert file types as required.

Topaz users can access all these capabilities from within Topaz’s familiar Eclipse development environment, eliminating the need to learn yet another new and complicated tool.

Those who experience it apparently like what they find. Noted Lynn Farley, Manager of Data Management at TCF Bank: “Testing with production-like obfuscated data helps us develop and deliver better quality applications, as well as remain compliant with data privacy requirements, and Topaz provides our developers with a way to implement data privacy rules to mask multiple data types across platforms and with consistent results.”

Rich Ptak, principal of IT analyst firm Ptak Associates similarly observed: “Leveraging a modern interface for fast, simple access to data for testing and other purposes is critical to digital agility,” adding it “resolves the long-standing challenge of rapidly getting value from the reams of data in disparate sources and formats that are critical to DevOps and continuous improvement.”

“The wealth of data that should give large enterprises a major competitive advantage in the digital economy often instead becomes a hindrance due to the complexity of sourcing across platforms, databases, and formats,” said Chris O’Malley,Comp CEO of Compuware. As DancingDinosaur sees it, by removing such obstacles Compuware reduces the friction between enterprise data and business advantage.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com and here.

Compuware Tackles Mainframe Workforce Attrition and Batch Processing

While IBM works furiously to deliver quantum computing and expand AI and blockchain into just about everything, many DancingDinosaur readers are still wrestling with the traditional headaches and boosting quality and efficiency or mainframe operations and optimizing the most traditional mainframe activities there are, batch processes. Would be nice if quantum computing could handle multiple batch operations simultaneously but that’s not high on IBM’s list of quantum priorities.

So Compuware is stepping up as it has been doing quarterly by delivering new systems to expedite and facilitate conventional mainframe processes.  Its zAdviser promises actionable analytic insight to continuously improve quality, velocity and efficiency on the mainframe. While Compuware’s ThruPut Manager enables next-gen ITstaff to optimize mainframe batch execution through new visually intuitive workload scheduling.

zAdviser captures data about developers’ behaviors

zAdviser uses machine learning to continuously measure and improve an organization’s mainframe DevOps processes and development outcomes. Based on key performance indicators (KPIs), zAdviser measures application quality, as well as development speed and the efficiency of a development team. The result: managers can now make evidence-based decisions in support of their continuous improvement efforts.

The new tool leverages a set of analytic models that uncover correlations between mainframe developer behaviors and mainframe DevOps KPIs. These correlations represent the best available empirical evidence regarding the impact of process, training and tooling decisions on digital business outcomes. Compuware is offering zAdviser free to customers on current maintenance.

zAdviser leverages a set of analytic models that uncover correlations between mainframe developer behaviors and mainframe DevOps KPIs. These correlations represent the best available empirical evidence regarding the impact of process, training and tooling decisions on digital business outcomes.

Long mainframe software backlogs are no longer acceptable. Improvements in mainframe DevOps has become an urgent imperative for large enterprises that find themselves even more dependent on mainframe applications—not less. According to a recent Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Compuware, 57 percent of enterprises with a mainframe run more than half of their business-critical workloads on the mainframe. That percentage is expected to increase to 64 percent by 2019, while at the same time enterprises are failing to replace the expert mainframe workforce they have lost by attrition. Hence the need for modern, automated, intelligent tools to speed the learning curve for workers groomed on Python or Node.js.

Meanwhile, IBM hasn’t exactly been twiddling its thumbs in regard to DevOps analytics for the Z. Its zAware delivers a self-contained firmware IT analytics offering that helps systems and operations professionals rapidly identify problematic messages and unusual system behavior in near real time, which systems administrators can use to take corrective actions.

ThruPut Manager brings a new web interface that offers  visually intuitive insight for the mainframe staff, especially new staff, into how batch jobs are being initiated and executed—as well as the impact of those jobs on mainframe software licensing costs.

By implementing ThruPut Manager, Compuware explains, enterprises can better safeguard the performance of both batch and non-batch applications while avoiding the significant adverse economic impact of preventable spikes in utilization as measured by Rolling 4-Hour Averages (R4HA). Reducing the R4HA is a key way data centers can contain mainframe costs.

More importantly,  with the new ThruPut Manager, enterprises can successfully transfer batch management responsibilities to the next generation of IT staff with far less hands-on platform experience—without exposing themselves to related risks such as missed batch execution deadlines, missed SLAs, and excess costs.

With these new releases, Compuware is providing a way to reduce the mainframe software backlog—the long growing complaint that mainframe shops cannot deliver new requested functionality fast enough—while it offers a way to replace the attrition among aging mainframe staff with young staff who don’t have years of mainframe experience to fall back on. And if the new tools lower some mainframe costs however modestly in the process, no one but IBM will complain.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com and here.

Mainframe ISVs Advance the Mainframe While IBM Focuses on Think

Last week IBM reveled in the attention of upwards of 30,000 visitors to its Think conference, reportedly a record for an IBM conference. Meanwhile Syncsort and Compuware stayed home pushing new mainframe initiatives. Specifically, Syncsort introduced innovations to deliver mainframe log and application data in real-time directly to Elastic for deeper next generation analytics through like Splunk, Hadoop and the Elastic Stack.

Syncsort Ironstone for next-gen analytics

Compuware reported that the percentage of organizations running at least half their business-critical applications on the mainframe expected to increase next year, although the loss of skilled mainframe staff, and the failure to subsequently fill those positions pose significant threats to application quality, velocity and efficiency. Compuware has been taking the lead in modernizing the mainframe developer experience to make it compatible with the familiar x86 experience.

According to David Hodgson, Syncsort’s chief product officer, many organizations are using Elastic’s Kibana to visualize Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack. These organizations, like others, are turning to tools like Hadoop and Splunk to get a 360-degree view of their mainframe data enterprise-wide. “In keeping with our proven track record of enabling our customers to quickly extract value from their critical data anytime, anywhere, we are empowering enterprises to make better decisions by making mission-critical mainframe data available in another popular analytics platform,” he adds.

For cost management, Syncsort now offers Ironstream with the flexibility of MSU-based (capacity) or Ingestion-based pricing.

Compuware took a more global view of the mainframe. The mainframe, the company notes, is becoming more important to large enterprises as the percentage of organizations running at least half their business-critical applications on that platform expected to increase next year. However, the loss of skilled mainframe staff, and the failure to subsequently fill those positions, pose significant threats to application quality, velocity and efficiency.

These are among the findings of research and analysis conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Compuware.  According to the study, “As mainframe workload increases—driven by modern analytics, blockchain and more mobile activity hitting the platform—customer-obsessed companies should seek to modernize application delivery and remove roadblocks to innovation.”

The survey of mainframe decision-makers and developers in the US and Europe also revealed the growing mainframe importance–64 percent of enterprises will run more than half of their critical applications on the platform within the next year, up from 57 percent this year. And just to ratchet up the pressure a few notches, 72 percent of customer-facing applications at these enterprises are completely or very reliant on mainframe processing.

That means the loss of essential mainframe staff hurts, putting critical business processes at risk. Overall, enterprises reported losing an average of 23 percent of specialized mainframe staff in the last five years while 63 percent of those positions have not been filled.

There is more to the study, but these findings alone suggest that mainframe investments, culture, and management practices need to evolve fast in light of the changing market realities. As Forrester puts it: “IT decision makers cannot afford to treat their mainframe applications as static environments bound by long release cycles, nor can they fail to respond to their critical dependence with a retiring workforce. Instead, firms must implement the modern tools necessary to accelerate not only the quality, but the speed and efficiency of their mainframe, as well as draw [new] people to work on the platform.”

Nobody has 10 years or even three years to cultivate a new mainframer. You need to attract and cultivate talented x86 or ARM people now, equip each—him or her—with the sexiest, most efficient tools, and get them working on the most urgent items at the top of your backlog.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Compuware Brings Multi-Platform DevOps to the Z

The rush has started to DevOps for Z. IBM jumped on the bandwagon with an updated release of IBM Developer for z Systems (IDz) V14.1.1, which allows Z organizations to provide new capabilities and product maintenance to users sooner than the traditional release models they previously used from IBM.

Even more recently, Compuware, which described DevOps and the mainframe as the ultimate win-win, announced a program to advance DevOps on the mainframe with integrated COBOL code coverage metrics for multi-platform DevOps.  This will make it possible for all developers in the organization to fluidly handle multi-platform code, including mainframe code, in a fast delivery DevOps approach.

SonarSource-Compuware DevOps Dashboard

The new Compuware-SonarSource integrations are expected to ease enterprise DevOps teams trying to track and validate code coverage of COBOL application testing and do it with the same ease and employing the same processes as they do with Java and other more mainstream code. This ability to automate code coverage tracking across platforms is yet another example of empowering enterprise IT to apply the same proven and essential Agile, DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) disciplines to both core systems-of-record (mainframe) as well as systems-of-engagement (mostly distributed systems).

Code coverage metrics promise insight into the degree to which source code is executed during a test. It identifies  which lines of code have been executed, and what percentage of an application has been tested. These measurements allow IT teams to understand the scope and effectiveness of its testing as code is moved towards production.

DevOps has become increasingly critical to mainframe shops that risk becoming irrelevant and even replaceable if they cannot turn around code improvements fast enough. The mainframe continues to be valued as the secure repository of the organization’s critical data but that won’t hold off those who feel the mainframe is a costly extravagance, especially when mainframe shops can’t turn out code updates and enhancements as fast as systems regarded as more inherently agile.

As Compuware puts it, the latest integrations automatically feed code coverage results captured by its Topaz for Total Test into SonarSource’s SonarQube. This gives DevOps teams an accurate, unified view of quality metrics and milestones across platforms enterprise-wide.

For z shops specifically, such continuous code quality management across platforms promises high value to large enterprises, enabling them to bring new digital deliverables to market, which increasingly is contingent on simultaneously updating code across both back-end mainframe systems-of-record and front-end mobile/web and distributed systems-of-engagement.

Specifically, notes Compuware, integration between Topaz for Total Test and SonarQube enables DevOps teams to:

• Gain insight into the coverage of code being promoted for all application components across all platforms
• Improve the rigor of digital governance with strong enforcement of mainframe QA policies for coding errors, data leakage, credential vulnerabilities, and more
• Shorten feedback loops to speed time-to-benefit and more promptly address shortfalls in COBOL skills and bottlenecks in mainframe DevOps processes

Topaz for Total Test captures code coverage metrics directly from the source code itself, rather than from a source listing, as is the case with outdated mainframe tools. This direct capture is more accurate and eliminates the need for development, Compuware reported.

The new integration actually encompasses a range of tools and capabilities. For instance:

From within a Compuware Xpediter debug session, a developer can kick off a Compuware Topaz for Total Test automated unit test and set it up to collect code coverage info as it runs. Code coverage metrics then can be automatically fed into SonarSource’s SonarQube where they can be displayed in a dashboard along with other quality metrics, such as lines going to subprograms.

It also integrates with Jenkins as a Continuous Integration (CI) platform, which acts as a process orchestrator and interacts with an SCM tool, such as Compuware ISPW, which automates software quality checks and pushes metrics onto SonarQube among other things. ISPW also is where code gets promoted to the various stages within the lifecycle and ultimately deployed. Finally Topaz is Compuware’s Eclipse-based IDE from which developers drive all these activities.

The Compuware announcement further delivers on its promise to mainstream the mainframe; that is, provide a familiar, modern, and intuitive multi-platform mainframe development environment—integrated with state-of-the-art DevOps tools for veteran mainframe developers and, more importantly, those newly engaged as IT newbies from the distributed world. In short, this is how you keep your Z relevant and invaluable going forward.

** Special note regarding last week’s DancingDinosaur reporting on chip problems here; Don’t count on an immediate solution coming from the vendors anytime soon; not Google, IBM, Intel, AMD, ARM, or others. The word among chip geeks is that the dependencies are too complex to be fully fixed with a patch. This probably requires new chip designs and fabrication. DancingDinosaur will keep you posted.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

Compuware Brings the Mainframe to AWS

IBM talks about the power of the cloud for the mainframe and has turned Bluemix into a cloud development and deployment platform for open systems. Where’s the Z?

Now Compuware has made for the past several years quarterly advances in its mainframe tooling, which are now  available through AWS. Not only have those advances made mainframe management and operations more intuitive and graphical through a string of Topaz releases, but with AWS it is now more accessible from anywhere. DancingDinosaur has been reporting on Compuware’s string of Topaz advances for two years, here, here, and here.

By tapping the power of both the cloud and the mainframe, enterprises can deploy Topaz to their global development workforce in minutes, accelerating the modernization of their mainframe environments. As Compuware noted: mainframe shops now have the choice of deploying Topaz on-premise or on AWS. By leveraging the cloud, they can deploy Topaz more quickly, securely, and scale without capital costs while benefiting from new Topaz features as soon as the company delivers them.

To make Topaz work on AWS Compuware turned to Amazon AppStream 2.0 technology, which provides for global development, test, and ops teams with immediate and secure cloud access to Compuware’s entire innovative mainframe Agile/DevOps solution stack, mainly Topaz. Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed, secure application streaming service that allows users to stream desktop applications from AWS to any device running a web browser.

Cloud-based deployment of Topaz, Compuware notes, allows for significantly faster implementation, simple administration, a virtual integrated development environment (IDE), adaptive capacity, and immediate developer access to software updates. The last of these is important, since Compuware has been maintaining a quarterly upgrade release schedule, in effect delivering new capabilities every 90 days.

Compuware is in the process of patenting technology to offer an intuitive, streamlined configuration menu that leverages AWS best practices to make it easy for mainframe admins to quickly configure secure connectivity between Topaz on AWS and their mainframe environment. It also enables the same connectivity to their existing cross-platform enterprise DevOps toolchains running on-premise, in the cloud, or both. The upshot: organizations can deploy Topaz across their global development workforce in minutes, accelerating the modernization of their mainframe environments.

Using Topaz on AWS, notes Compuware, mainframe shops can benefit in a variety of ways, specifically:

• Modify, test and debug COBOL, PL/I, Assembler and other mainframe code via an Eclipse-based virtual IDE
• Visualize complex and/or undocumented application logic and data relationships
• Manage source code and promote artifacts through the DevOps lifecycle
• Perform common tasks such as job submission, review, print and purge
• Leverage a single data editor to discover, visualize, edit, compare, and protect mainframe files and data

The move to the Eclipse-based IDE presents a giant step for traditional mainframe shops trying to modernize. Eclipse is a leading open source IDE with IBM as a founding member. In addition to Eclipse, Compuware also integrates with other modern tools, including Jenkins, SonarSource, Altassian. Jenkins is an open source automation server written in Java that helps to automate the non-human part of software development process with continuous integration while facilitating technical aspects of continuous delivery. SonarSource enables visibility into mainframe application quality. Atlassian develops products for software developers, project managers, and content management and is best known for Jira, its issue tracking application.

Unlike many mainframe ISVs, Compuware has been actively partnering with various innovative vendors to extend the mainframe’s tool footprint and bring the kind of tools to the mainframe that young developers, especially Millennials, want. Yes, it is possible to access the sexy REST-based Web and mobile tools through IBM’s Bluemix, but for mainframe shops it appears kludgy. By giving its mainframe customers access through AWS to advanced tools, Compuware improves on this. And AWS beats Bluemix in terms of cloud penetration and low cost.

All mainframe ISVs should make their mainframe products accessible through the cloud if they want to keep their mainframe products relevant. IBM has its cloud; of course there is AWS, Microsoft has Azure, and Google rounds out the top four. These and others will keep cloud economics competitive for the foreseeable future. Hope to see you in the cloud.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Latest Compuware Tools Bring Mainframe and DevOps Together

At the end of June Compuware announced the integration of Topaz for Total Test, an automated unit testing tool for COBOL, with Jenkins, SonarQube and Compuware ISPW. Together, the technologies enable enterprises nimbly, easily and efficiently update their core mainframe applications in response to ever-changing business requirements.  This continues the company’s ongoing quarterly releases of updates and modernization of mainframe tools.

The latest enable mainframe legacy technologies to participate in integrated modern DevOps. They allow enterprise IT to better orchestrate changes to mainframe systems of record with changes to systems of engagement—a significant benefit given the fact that customer-facing digital services often rely on code running across multiple platforms, legacy and distributed.

Compuware Topaz for Total Test

The days when a mainframe shop can get by with leisurely updates of their systems, especially their business critical applications, are long gone.  Organizations need to modernize and integrate their tools to deliver the kind of fast response attributed to DevOps.

Of course, successful DevOps, whether mainframe or distributed, is less a matter of tools than of culture, communication, and process.  Still, there’s no doubt that modern, integrated, and context-aware tools along with automation help by speeding the process and reducing mistakes.

Topaz for Total Test appears to cover all the tool bases. It brings together automated unit testing for COBOL with Jenkins, SonarQube, and Compuware ISPW. Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration software tool written in the Java for testing and reporting on isolated changes in a larger code base in real time. The real time aspect is critical for DevOps, where speed counts. The software enables developers to find and solve defects in a code base rapidly and to automate testing of their builds. SonarQube (formerly Sonar[1]) is an open source platform for continuous inspection of code quality. Again, error elimination counts.

The problem, as Compuware sees it, comes from mainframe shops’ historical inability to update their business-critical COBOL applications fast enough due to antiquated tools, excessive dependence on specialized expertise, and risk concerns. All these combine to produce long delays in updating code.

The addition of Jenkins and SonarQube along with Compuware’s ISPW source code management and deployment produce a pretty complete DevOps package for mainframes. In addition, Compuware strengthened support for DB2. That support entails new stubbing for DB2 databases, which allows developers to run unit tests without requiring an active connection to a live DB2 database. While Topaz for Total Test can be used to test code that processes all types of mainframe data, its stubbing capability for DB2 but also VSAM and QSAM data types. This makes it easier to create repeatable tests fast. Data stubs are created automatically and do not require re-compiling.

Although much of the world’s business activity still revolves in one way or another around the mainframe, many mainframe shops struggle when it comes to updating those applications to reflect rapidly changing business demands. Typically, they are hampered by manual development and testing processes; ongoing loss of specialized COBOL programming knowledge; and the fear of introducing even the slightest defect into core mainframe systems of record, notes Compuware.

And it gets worse. “Given the abject failure of re-platforming initiatives, large enterprises hoping to avoid digital irrelevance must aggressively modernize their mainframe DevOps practices,” said Rich Ptak of IT analyst firm Ptak Associates in Compuware’s Topaz for Total Test announcement. “Key to the modernization and ‘de-legacing’ of mainframe applications is the adoption of unit testing for COBOL code that is equivalent to and well-integrated with unit testing as practiced across the rest of the enterprise codebase.”

Compuware Topaz for Total Test transforms mainframe application development by automatically breaking COBOL code down into units and creating tests for those logical units. Developers at all skill levels—not just mainframe cowboys but preferably those with distributed and open system skills or even systems novices—can quickly and easily perform unit testing on COBOL code just as they do in Java, PHP and other popular programming languages. In fact, Topaz is actually more advanced than typical Java tools, because it requires no coding and automatically generates default unit test result assertions for developers.  So yes, novices are welcome.

With the recently released integrations and enhancements, Compuware has now delivered mainframe innovations for eleven consecutive quarters. Few mainframe shops even try to do this, not even IBM. This reflects Compuware’s commitment to improving innovation throughput and quality using the latest Agile and DevOps methods.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Syncsort Drives zSystem and Distributed Data Integration

IBM appears to be so busy pursuing its strategic imperatives—security, blockchain, quantum computing, and cognitive computing—that it seems to have forgotten the daily activities that make up the bread-and-butter of mainframe data centers. Stepping up to fill the gap have been mainframe ISVs like Compuware, Syncsort, Data Kinetics, and a few others.

IBM’s Project DataWorks taps into unstructured data often missed

IBM hasn’t completely ignored this need. For instance, Project DataWorks uses Watson Analytics and natural language processing to analyze and create complex visualizations. Syncsort, on the other hand, latched onto open Apache technologies, starting in the fall of 2015. Back then it introduced a set of tools to facilitate data integration through Apache Kafka and Apache Spark, two of the most active Big Data open source projects for handling real-time, large-scale data processing, feeds, and analytics.

Syncsort’s primary integration vehicle then revolved around the Intelligent Execution capabilities of its DMX data integration product suite with Apache Spark. Intelligent Execution allows users to visually design data transformations once and then run them anywhere – across Hadoop, MapReduce, Spark, Linux, Windows, or Unix, both on premise or in the cloud.

Since then Syncsort, in March, announced another big data integration solution. This time its DMX-h, is now integrated with Cloudera Director, enabling organizations to easily deploy DMX-h along with Cloudera Enterprise on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. By deploying DMX-h with CDH, Syncsort explained, organizations can quickly pull data into new, ready-to-work clusters in the cloud. This accelerates how quickly they can take advantage of big data cloud benefits, including cost savings and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) delivery.

A month before that, this past February, Syncsort introduced new enhancements in its Big Data integration solution by again deploying DMX-h to deliver integrated workflow capabilities and Spark 2.0 integration, which simplifies Hadoop and Spark application development, effectively enabling mainframe data centers to extract maximum value from their data assets.

In addition, Syncsort brought new integrated workflow capabilities and Spark 2.0 integration to simplify Hadoop and Spark application development. It lets data centers tap value from their enterprise data assets regardless of where it resides, whether on the mainframe, in distributed systems, or in the cloud.

Syncsort’s new integrated workflow capability also gives organizations a simpler, more flexible way to create and manage their data pipelines. This is done through the company’s design-once, deploy-anywhere architecture with support for Apache Spark 2.0, which makes it easy for organizations to take advantage of the benefits of Spark 2.0 and integrated workflow without spending time and resources redeveloping their jobs.

Assembling such an end-to-end data pipeline can be time-consuming and complicated, with various workloads executed on multiple platforms, all of which need to be orchestrated and kept up to date. Delays in such complicated development, however, can prevent organizations from getting the timely insights they need for effective decision-making.

Enter Syncsort’s Integrated Workflow, which helps organizations manage various workloads, such as batch ETL on large repositories of historical data. This can be done by referencing business rules during data ingest in a single workflow, in effect simplifying and speeding development of the entire data pipeline, from accessing critical enterprise data, to transforming that data, and ultimately analyzing it for business insights.

Finally, in October 2016 Syncsort announced new capabilities in its Ironstream software that allows organizations to access and integrate mainframe log data in real-time to Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI). Further, the integration of Ironstream and Compuware’s Application Audit software deliver the audit data to Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). This integration improves an organization’s ability to detect threats against critical mainframe data, correlate them with related information and events, and satisfy compliance requirements.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Compuware-Syncsort-Splunk to Boost Mainframe Security

The mainframe has proven to be remarkably secure over the years, racking up the highest security certifications available. But there is still room for improvement. Earlier this week Compuware announced Application Audit, a software tool that aims to transform mainframe cybersecurity and compliance through real-time capture of user behavior.

Capturing user behavior, especially in real-time, is seemingly impossible if you have to rely on the data your collect from the various logs and SMF data.  Compuware’s solution, Application Audit, in conjunction with Syncsort and Splunk, fully captures and analyzes start-to-finish mainframe application user behavior.

As Compuware explains: Most enterprises still rely on disparate logs and SMF data from security products such as RACF, CA-ACF2 and CA-Top Secret to piece together user behavior.  This is too slow if you want to capture bad behavior while it’s going on. Some organization try to apply analytics to these logs but that also is too slow. By the time you have collected enough logs to deduce who did what and when the damage may have been done.  Throw in the escalating demands of cross-platform enterprise cybersecurity and increasingly burdensome global compliance mandates you haven’t a chance without an automated tool optimized for this.

Fortunately, the mainframe provides rich and comprehensive session data you can run through and analyze with Application Audit and in conjunction with the organization’s security information and event management (SIEM) systems to more quickly and effectively see what really is happening. Specifically, it can:

• Detect, investigate, and respond to inappropriate behavior by internal users with access
• Detect, investigate, and respond to hacked or illegally accessed user accounts
• Support criminal/legal investigations with complete and credible forensics
• Fulfill compliance mandates regarding protection of sensitive data

IBM, by the way, is not ignoring the advantages of analytics for z security.  Back in February you read about IBM bringing its cognitive system to the z on DancingDinosaur.  IBM continues to flog cognitive on z for real-time analytics and security; promising to enable faster customer insights, business insights, and systems insights with decisions based on real-time analysis of both current and historical data delivered on an analytics platform designed for availability, optimized for flexibility, and engineered with the highest levels of security. Check out IBM’s full cognitive for z pitch.

The data Compuware and Syncsort collect with Application Audit is particularly valuable for maintaining control of privileged mainframe user accounts. Both private- and public-sector organizations are increasingly concerned about insider threats to both mainframe and non-mainframe systems. Privileged user accounts can be misused by their rightful owners, motivated by everything from financial gain to personal grievances, as well as by malicious outsiders who have illegally acquired the credentials for those accounts. You can imagine what havoc they could wreak.

In addition, with Application Audit Compuware is orchestrating a number of players to deliver the full security picture. Specifically, through collaboration with CorreLog, Syncsort and Splunk, Compuware is enabling enterprise customers to integrate Application Audit’s mainframe intelligence with popular SIEM solutions such as Splunk, IBM QRadar, and HPE Security ArcSight ESM. Additionally, Application Audit provides an out-of-the-box Splunk-based dashboard that delivers value from the start. As Compuware explains, these integrations are particularly useful for discovering and addressing security issues associated with today’s increasingly common composite applications, which have components running on both mainframe and non-mainframe platforms. SIEM integration also ensures that security, compliance and other risk management staff can easily access mainframe-related data in the same manner as they access data from other platforms.

“Effective IT management requires effective monitoring of what is happening for security, cost reduction, capacity planning, service level agreements, compliance, and other purposes,” noted Stu Henderson, Founder and President of the Henderson Group in the Compuware announcement. “This is a major need in an environment where security, technology, budget, and regulatory pressures continue to escalate.”

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.