People who say “the Mainframe is dying” often have little to no mainframe experience, making it difficult for them to fully comprehend how important the platform is to the digital economy.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the mainframe is the backbone of today’s digital economy1, integral to:
- 90% of the world’s largest airlines
- 92/100 of the top banks
- 87% of all credit card transactions
As you can see, rather than “dying”, the mainframe is truly thriving!
I believe the real issue here is the perception that the mainframe is rigid and immutable. This puts it at odds with today’s near-constant change in enterprise IT and the drive towards digital transformation.
Conducted in 2018, BMC’s Mainframe survey shows that 65% of organizations have started using Agile/DevOps practices and 48% of them are already practicing it in their mainframe environments. But problems arise when the mainframe ecosystem’s desire for stability and high-performance clashes with the requirement for rapid development and deployment of applications. This results in a “velocity gap” that is created when the speed of application roll outs exceeds that of database changes. The market needs a way of bridging this velocity gap.
To address this and other challenges brought about by a rapidly changing mainframe IT environment, BMC Software has developed Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI), a strategic initiative that delivers the industry’s broadest set of self-managing capabilities on the mainframe. AMI will be delivered by a modern family of solutions spanning mainframe security, systems and databases.
As a part of the AMI strategy, BMC is developing BMC AMI DevOps for Db2, to bridge the velocity gap between mainframe application development and database operations. BMC AMI DevOps for Db2 improves communications between developers and DBAs and cuts down the rework rate and unnecessary overheads between the groups. You get intelligent and automated database change management that greatly improves your DevOps process. It aligns and automates the database change process with DevOps automation tools resulting in complete “in-sync” automation between application and database changes. By becoming part of the pipeline of the latest available DevOps tools like Jenkins, UCD, and XL-Deploy, BMC AMI DevOps for Db2 assures the expeditious deployment of Db2 application/schema changes and enforcement of best practices in a customizable self-service environment.
BMC AMI DevOps for Db2 will be available in the market later this year. In the meantime, read “Embrace Digital Transformation with IBM® DB2®” by Craig Mullins and learn how your organization can embrace constant change and ensure that effective, efficient, and modern Db2 databases and applications are being built. We’ve also launched the beta program for BMC AMI DevOps for Db2. Visit us at BMC’s Db2 Community to learn more about the beta program for this innovative new solution.
1 https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/why-mainframe↩
BMC AMI - Automated Mainframe Intelligence
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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