Top Trends Driving the Data Center in 2015
After viewing the mainframe world through the lens of private companies, BMC Software and Compuware announced today that they are working together to better integrate their respective offerings.
Under the terms of the new alliance, the Strobe software that Compuware developed to identify bottlenecks in mainframe applications will be integrated with the BMC MainView application performance management solution and the BMC Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise software.
Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley says that since there is very little overlap between the mainframe software that the two companies provide, it makes sense for the companies to expand their technology, marketing and sales relationships.
After Compuware revamped its portfolio of mainframe software, O’Malley says that working with BMC will allow the two companies to cooperatively address DevOps issues that have conspired to both make mainframe environments more expensive to operate and less agile in terms of IT flexibility. As part of that effort, Compuware also announced today that it has upgraded its Strobe software to include support for transactions running on IMS databases in addition to DB2.
Bill Miller, president of Zsolutions and select technologies for BMC Software, adds that the two companies have also identified another potential half dozen areas where they can both work together to bring down the cost of mainframe software.
In general, the combined offerings of the two companies should enable organizations that have deployed mainframes to save as much as 20 percent on their mainframe software costs. Because IBM bills organizations for mainframe usage based on a Monthly License Charge (MLC), having the ability to identify code that may be unnecessarily driving up consumption of mainframe CPU cycles is critical, says Miller. In fact, Miller says that reining in mainframe software costs is the key to both keeping existing application workloads and attracting new ones to the mainframe.
It remains to be seen where the alliance between the two private companies will wind up. But at the very least, there should now be an alternative to IBM that has enough heft to provide some much-needed mainframe checks and balances.
