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An Integrated DevOps Strategy for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise

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John McKenny

BMC’s acquisition of Compuware offers best of breed mainframe development, delivery, performance and operational expertise to scale agile and the DevOps toolchain

As the economic impact of COVID-19 continues to unfold, business focus in every industry has shifted from growth to simply surviving. As we enter summer months in the western hemisphere, tourism has come to a screeching halt, the auto industry reported car sales were down 50% year-over-year in April, retail sales were down 16.4% from March to April in the US and the banking industry is facing less credit card usage overall with less swipes and ATM transactions.

Despite these economic impacts, when we again achieve stability, the digital enterprise will continue to advance rapidly. Over the next five to ten years, there will be even more changes across every industry sector as people, technologies, data, devices, and ever-expanding networks converge to transform every aspect of work and life.

BMC is proud to be leading the charge in the mainframe’s evolution to meet these new business demands with our Enterprise 2025 vision around the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) – a roadmap back for customers to rebuild, renew and strengthen their business.

What is an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE)?

Simply put, an ADE is an organization built to successfully navigate and succeed in the digital era through agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights. It is built on five technology-enabled tenets:

  1. A transcendent customer experience is key when you’re only as good as your latest app release. Today’s most agile apps create a compelling user experience (UX) with outstanding design and connected microservices. For many of the most critical applications that includes microservices running on mainframes.
  2. Automation everywhere is inter-woven throughout – providing predictive models for issue resolution, knowledge sharing, app development and deployment, and much more.
  3. An enterprise DevOps approach is necessary to deliver differentiated customer experiences. Developers are users too and they need a compelling developer experience (DX) that enables them to jumpstart application development from mobile to mainframe.
  4. A data driven approach with predictive models can help our customers gain insights and achieve a faster time to value from their technology investments in development, operations and security.
  5. Adaptive cybersecurity protects the mainframe from vulnerabilities and risks, predicts attacks before they happen and informs Security & Operations how to harden the mainframe against future threats.

BMC ADE Fullmodel

When our customers can bring all five of these pillars together, they’re truly an Autonomous Digital Enterprise with benefits ranging from faster time to market with apps and services, an environment that’s just as innovative as it is secure and experience greater cost efficiencies.

The ADE is not just a roadmap for our customers, it’s also BMC’s roadmap for the future. One of the areas where we’re driving innovation is in the enterprise DevOps tenet.

Compuware, a BMC company

BMCs acquisition of Compuware has officially closed as of June 1. It’s our largest and one of our most strategic acquisitions. Compuware brings to BMC its application development, delivery and performance solutions to scale agile and DevOps across the enterprise with an open borders approach and connected DevOps toolchain.

Businesses that implement an agile DevOps toolchain experience measurable benefits when developing and delivering apps and services across the mainframe.

  • With a continuous improvement methodology, quality is increased throughout the process of building, analyzing, testing, deploying and managing apps and services.
  • An agile DevOps toolchain increases volume and velocity in bringing apps that run on the mainframe to market quicker vs traditional waterfall development.
  • Efficiencies are increased, development bottlenecks are avoided and measurable KPIs are met throughout this iterative development process.

DevOps

A scalable, connected, and agile DevOps toolchain is key to BMCs ADE vision – mainstreaming the mainframe to meet digital demands.

Mainstreaming the Mainframe

The Compuware acquisition is allowing BMC to broaden our expertise to a different mainframe audience – expanding into and servicing the development community. Empowering the next generation of mainframe developers is important as the changing of the guard takes place with experienced mainframe staff continuing to retire, making room for the next generation of mainframe stewards.

Compuware’s Topaz suite, ISPW technology, and classic product portfolios offer support for automation and intelligent operations with agile development and delivery across the mainframe infrastructure and its applications. Now developers, regardless of experience, can excel when working with mainframe languages like COBOL, applications, data, and infrastructure while still having the operations monitoring they need.

Compuware also offers flexibility of an open-borders approach to enterprise DevOps with 40+ integrations with providers such CloudBees, Jenkins, XebiaLabs (now Digital.ai) and more. This collaborative mindset is key when we look to BMC’s solutions and expertise in the mainframe operations and performance space.

BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (BMC AMI)

Investing in organic innovation is how we enable BMC AMI to help our customers modernize their intelligent mainframe environments on their ADE journey. And while all of BMCs portfolio is encapsulated in the ADE strategy, BMC AMI transcends across all five of its tenets.

We personify BMC AMI in four areas:

  1. She’s the doctor who diagnosis issues across your mainframe infrastructure. BMC AMI AIOps, uses machine learning for accurate anomaly detection with a unique blend of KPIs to predict future problems in the performance and health of the mainframe.
  2. She’s the security professional who can proactively expose your mainframe vulnerabilities, pivots to action before its compromised and enables your security team to respond, adapt and reduce the attack surface. BMC AMI Security hardens your defense, predicts, evolves and closes the window of vulnerability and extends your security expertise to a critical piece of your mainframe infrastructure.
  3. She’s the librarian and data scientist who keeps your data organized and always available to the right people so you can quickly gain new insights from one of your most important business assets – your information. BMC AMI Data Management solutions leverage automation and intelligence with fast and powerful data movement, migration and optimization capabilities that enable a new generation of Dev and Ops teams to collaborate and create with the most timely and accurate data available.
  4. She’s the financial advisor who helps you make the right investments. BMC AMI Cost and Capacity Management solutions help balance usage with cost to increase availability, avoid bottlenecks, maintain cost efficiencies while keeping the business need in focus.

What the Compuware acquisition does is marry the self-analyzing, self-healing, and self-optimizing power of the BMC AMI suite of products – increasing mainframe availability, efficiency, and security – with the Compuware Topaz suite, to fully empower the next generation of developers to build, analyze, test, deploy, and manage apps and services across the platform at scale – continuing to modernize the mainframe as a viable platform for development. BMC AMI and Compuware’s portfolio blends strategy with innovation to empower our customer’s success on their journey to becoming an ADE.

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These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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About the author

John McKenny

As Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation for ZSolutions at BMC Software, John leads the Product Management and Solutions Marketing teams to innovate the mainframe to meet the needs of today’s evolving digital economy. John has over 24yrs of management experience at BMC alone and, prior to joining, he led various IT management teams and strategies for 15 years in the transportation and insurance industries.