Mainframe Blog

Taking the Headache Out of Mainframe Maintenance Delivery

2 minute read
Paul Spicer

Receive Order: Start the New Year with Improved Maintenance Delivery Made Easy!

As part of our ongoing mission to make business easier for our customers by using industry standard best practices, BMC is happy to announce that it now offers a new maintenance delivery service: Receive Order. This new delivery method uses the IBM SMP/E RECEIVE ORDER process to acquire BMC Mainframe product maintenance over the internet by securely submitting an order for PTFs and HOLDDATA to a BMC Order server.

You can reduce hours of maintenance time down to just minutes, making your system programmers more productive and allowing them to focus on higher value tasks. After a successful pilot program, Receive Order is already being used by several large BMC customers. They are saying that Receive Order is very easy to use and highly intuitive. Receive Order is standardizing maintenance retrieval and helping to make the mainframe platform viable for new mainframe professionals.

BMC Receive Order:

  • Eliminates time-consuming fix searches and the need to select maintenance manually through the BMC Support Portal
  • Automates delivery of BMC maintenance directly to your mainframe
  • Fulfills orders based on the status of your SMP/E environments
  • Enables scheduling of maintenance downloads
  • Facilitates an easier installation of BMC Recommended and Preventive services
  • Provides a secure transfer method to ensure the integrity of maintenance downloads
  • Replaces the BMC ISR application with a more secure, industry standard method

With the BMC support for Receive Order, you can acquire maintenance on demand or can schedule a SMP/E job to run regularly. The BMC Order server supports the IBM-documented order types, which include: ALL, APARS, CRITICAL, HOLDDATA, PTFS, and RECOMMENDED.

BMC customers can immediately start to use Receive Order for BMC maintenance acquisition and take advantage of all the listed benefits.

Get a head start on the new year here and download the documentation!

Access the 2023 Mainframe Report

The results of the 18th annual BMC Mainframe Survey are in, and the state of the mainframe remains strong. Overall perception of the mainframe is positive, as is the outlook for future growth on the platform, with workloads growing and investment in new technologies and processes increasing.


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

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About the author

Paul Spicer

Paul Spicer is a lead product manager for BMC’s zSolutions and is responsible for Automation, Middleware Management and Install strategy.

Paul has over 35 years of experience working with IBM mainframe systems, with over 30 years providing systems management solutions in roles spanning software development and product management.

Prior to joining BMC, Paul worked at software vendors including Macro4, Candle Corporation and IBM.