Mainframe focus

CA Technologies has announced at its second annual Built to Change Summit new leading-edge solutions that unleash the power of the mainframe for the future and new possibilities for the Modern Software Factory. CA Brightside and a new partnership with IBM seek to help clients modernise their IT infrastructure to innovate faster. CA Mainframe Resource Intelligence is a SaaS-based offering that helps clients realises ROI opportunities for the mainframe through an assessment and recommendations to optimise performance.

Thursday, 7th June 2018 Posted 6 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The Next Phase of DevOps (For the Mainframe)

CA and long-term partner IBM are announcing a strategic partnership to jointly develop and sell new services for IBM’s Cloud Managed Services on z Systems (zCloud). This partnership enables clients that rely on the mainframe for business critical operations to easily access development, testing, application management and regulatory compliance services within IBM’s zCloud offering for operational resiliency, efficiencies and workforce agility.

Together, IBM and CA Technologies will provide a suite of mainframe software solutions, including the newly-released CA Brightside. First available on IBM zCloud, CA Brightside makes it easy to integrate the mainframe into enterprise DevOps workflows. It is the first solution designed to increase the productivity of development teams to control, script and build for the mainframe like any other cloud platform, using familiar open source tools.

“Our clients are accelerating their digital transformation and many are incorporating the mainframe as an essential part of their transformation,” said Philip Guido, general manager of Infrastructure Services for IBM Global Technology Services. “To assist our clients, IBM introduced Cloud Managed Services on z Systems. This service combines the security and power of IBM’s mainframe with the flexibility and scalability of the IBM Cloud. IBM and CA are committed to deepening the platform’s role in enterprise digital transformation.”

Clients using Cloud Managed Services on z Systems can also leverage CA tools to help reduce costs, speed application deployment and integration with:

CA Brightside: Easily develop applications for the mainframe using existing open source tools and frameworks such as Jenkins, Gradle and IntelliJ thru a command line interface.
CA Service Virtualization: Rapidly test and modify applications in place, making it easier for companies to do mainframe test and development in the cloud.
CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence: Monitor applications in the cloud and integrate into existing digital performance management solutions.
CA Data Content Discovery: Find, classify and protect data to safeguard clients’ personally identifiable information and help meet compliance regulations.

“CA and IBM have an opportunity to help our clients overcome challenges in rising costs of IT ownership, workforce evolution and security issues head on,” said Greg Lotko, general manager, Mainframe at CA Technologies. “Together, we give every company an opportunity to realise even greater value in their investments by combining the reliability of the mainframe with the speed and agility of DevOps.”

The software and services are available today to all IBM Managed Cloud Services for z Systems clients in North America and will be rolled out globally throughout the rest of 2018.

Using Automation to Speed Mainframe ROI

CA Mainframe Resource Intelligence is an industry-first solution to help realise the greatest value from existing mainframe investments. Delivering reports with actionable insights and practical steps to achieve business results in days, rather than months, this SaaS-based assessment offering automates scanning and the collection of disparate data to assess and visualise potential savings, optimisation and investment scenarios. This is impactful as a significant majority (78 percent) of mainframe clients plan to grow MIPS by 10 percent*, but most have not been given any additional budget or resources to do so.

“We use the mainframe to run many aspects of our business,” said Phil Mangis, vice president, Information Systems at Dollar Bank. “It’s critical we operate as efficiently as possible. The process of optimisation is relentless, continuous and labour-intensive. I see great opportunity in what CA Mainframe Resource Intelligence can do for our business through data automation coupled with reports and benchmarks that quickly reveal what is happening on our mainframe with actionable insights.”

In addition to these new innovations for mainframe environments, CA also announced a set of new solutions and capabilities spanning across its comprehensive enterprise software portfolio.