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Don’t Forget the Mainframe When it Comes to Enterprise DevOps

2 minute read
Ram Chakravarti

Have you heard about BMC’s perspective on the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, and, if so, have you started to think about how your organization can reach this vision? With the current economic climate forcing change on virtually all of us, perhaps you’ve recognized parts of your business that are prime for consideration in terms of their ability to deliver a transcendent customer experience or monetize value from data as an asset.

While all the technology tenets of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise are key to successfully navigating ongoing social, technological, and market changes, Enterprise DevOps has the ability to keep your organization ahead of competitors in terms of pure operational speed and efficiency—opening the door to innovation. With BMC’s acquisition of BMC AMI DevX, it’s a great time to talk about how the principles of software DevOps, with their focus on autonomy and agility, can make a huge impact across every facet of your business. And why making the mainframe a part of your overall development strategy is critical in making Enterprise DevOps successful.

What is Enterprise DevOps?

While the term Enterprise DevOps has mutated to embody a rather diverse set of definitions across technology and business environments, two common definitions have emerged:

  1. The ability to run agile teams that scale across the entire business and technology portfolio of an enterprise. This definition applies the principles of Agile and software DevOps process models, with an automation mindset. It allows (mainly digital) products and processes to optimize their velocity, consistency, and efficiency—and respond rapidly to change (e.g., market needs).
  2. The extension of DevOps principles to all related processes touching and surrounding the DevOps pipeline. This model pushes the principles of agile development of software DevOps (e.g., “DevOps”) to the surrounding processes (e.g., release planning, change management, product operations). It optimizes the objectives of the core software DevOps pipeline (i.e., rapid and continuous delivery of software applications and services).

From an Autonomous Digital Enterprise perspective, we’re strictly talking about the second definition and how organizations address the challenges to realize this holistic objective.

Why DevOps and the Mainframe?

Organizations that run a mainframe are well aware of its importance to conducting business at scale. BMC’s mainframe software runs in nine of the top 10 global financial institutions and nine of the top 10 U.S. financial institutions. Most of the financial and flight booking transactions you run likely are processed by a mainframe.

If your business runs a mainframe, then it must be treated like your cloud or distributed systems and made a part of your DevOps processes. Mainframe modernization efforts have made it easier to work with mainframe-based systems and enable non-COBOL programmers to still interface with mainframe systems and the data they contain.

Not including the mainframe in the DevOps process will slow development efforts and impede your ability to quickly and efficiently deliver new features and services to your customers.

Why BMC and Compuware?

As my colleague John McKenny observes, the addition of BMC AMI DevX marries 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.

For those of you that know the value of the mainframe for your organization, now is the perfect time to make sure it’s part of your Enterprise DevOps effort. The payoff could be immense.

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

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About the author

Ram Chakravarti

Ram Chakravarti serves as the chief technology officer for BMC Software, Inc. In this role, he oversees BMC’s overall technology strategy, common architecture, corporate development, and shared services including user experience design, quality assurance, and cyber security.