Ptak Associates Tech Blog: 2019

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Compuware Delivers Mainframe Agility in 5 Years!

By Rich Ptak

Courtesy of Compuware, Inc.

With 20 consecutive quarters of solution delivery, built with a combination of partnerships, acquisitions, product innovation and DevOps integrations, Compuware has proven its ability to “mainstream the mainframe” and has become the “mainframe partner for the next 50 years.” Chris O’Malley and his team successfully transformed Compuware into a fast moving, agile, DevOps-driven, customer-focused enterprise. It has a highly productive, cooperative culture that is creative, motivated and innovative.

This is a completely different enterprise than it was five years ago. Then, developers were locked into traditional linear waterfall processes. Teams were siloed and operations were process-bound. Reliably delivering updates every 12 to 18 months, they had a decades-old model wildly out-of-sync with an increasingly digitized world. A new generation of Agile-minded, DevOps-savvy developers viewed mainframes as far from the digitized IT mainstream; boring, and uninteresting to learn or use.

Major challenges had to be overcome including converting resistance to change to enthusiastic innovation and building teams to promote knowledge/skill-sharing in and among teams. It was also critical to set new goals fixated on improving mainframe software delivery—for both employees and customers—awash with outdated, platform unique, unintegrated tools with incompatible interfaces. All to increase efficiency and minimize the loss of individual/institutional knowledge.

To overcome these challenges bold moves were necessary. Compuware focused on four core philosophies to drive its internal transformation:

Enable ideation and innovation through open communication
Drive agility and speed as core values building confidence to fail quickly and succeed faster
Maintain quality through consistent testing that is frequent, pervasive, automatic
Listen to customers first, that input underlies and guides every decision Compuware makes

These principles applied to every task, to everyone, at all levels, in every department.

Significant Takeaways for Large Enterprises

Compuware’s transformation and success to date provides some powerful lessons for large enterprises. First, keeping the customer top of mind pays big market dividends. Second, embracing big challenges with empowered staff yields significant dividends in terms of employee engagement, productivity and performance. Third, growth emerges as a direct result of continuously searching out and creatively promoting new ideas. Finally, leaders with bold vision are critical to build and maintain the innovative environment necessary to a successful enterprise.

The business results? Here’s a look at some of the highlights along Compuware’s path to mainframe agility.

Pathway to Mainframe Agility, DevOps, CI/CD

Compuware’s transformational change yielded an on-going stream of new products and technologies, e.g. the Topaz suite of development and testing tools, benefited customers as well as the overall DevOps community. Creative collaboration and integrations with companies such as XebiaLabs, SonarSource and Splunk enable enterprises to build cross-platform DevOps toolchains enabling developers of every stripe to perform and improve the processes necessary to fulfill each phase of today’s DevOps lifecycle.

Technologies and Products

Compuware released six new products in five years:

Topaz for Enterprise Data: enables developers to work with mainframe and distributed data in a common manner. Rich visualization of data relationships and data extracts increases application understanding, while a data editor offers a consistent look and feel for working with and across virtually all data types, e.g. Oracle, Db2, IMS, VSAM, etc.
Topaz for Program Analysis: provides deep visibility into complex interactions between mainframe programs making it easier for veteran and novice developers alike to understand, update and troubleshoot even the oldest and most complex mainframe code.
Topaz for Total Test: automates unit, functional, integration and regression testing.
Topaz on AWS: leverages AWS to deploy Topaz securely, quickly and at scale without additional capital costs. Topaz on AWS templates leverage and manage AWS network and infrastructure resources to fit organizational needs.
Application Audit: provides detailed tracking of all user interactions with any application on the mainframe thus providing active protection against internal security attacks.
zAdviser: provided for free to Compuware customers, it uses machine learning to identify correlations between developer behaviors and key performance indicators (KPIs) based on analysis of DevOps data and Compuware product usage data.

Acquisitions
Compuware made five acquisitions, integrated them, and continues to enhance these products quarter after quarter:

ISPW (ISPW Benchmark Technologies) – today includes market differentiating SCM, build and deploy capabilities and integrations with XebiaLabs XL Release, CloudBees Flow, SonarSource SonarQube and others making it a leading mainframe CI/CD solution.
ISPW SCM Migrations Services (Itegrations SCM migration and practice methodology) – takes customers through the full SCM migration process from project planning, data migration and integration to testing and knowledge transfer.
COPE (Standardware) – virtualizes IMS systems, significantly reducing the delays and costs associated with creating completely new IMS subsystems for critical initiatives. The resulting easily adjusted and modified virtualized images eliminate the time, expense and difficulty of working with physical test systems infrastructures.
ThruPut Manager (MVS Solutions) automatically and intelligently optimizes batch processing. By balancing workloads and improving batch throughput, it yields savings, including reducing software license fees.
XaTester (Xact Consulting) enables developers to quickly create unit tests for both batch and CICS-based programs written in COBOL, PL/I and Assembler. Today Topaz for Total Test, which automates unit, functional and integration testing, combines the unique strengths of XaTester in a single unified solution.

Integrations
Technology integration partnerships are key to providing mainframe developers agility without compromise and mainstream the mainframe. They add modern tools familiar to non-mainframe developers, lowering barriers to mainframe use. For example, integrating XebiaLabs software with Topaz for Total Test with ISPW provides end-to-end automated application pipeline management. It allows a consistent, seamless interface in complex environments, cloud, containers and mainframe as it automatically captures detailed data of ALL release activities (from development thru all changes and deployment steps).

Integrating the SonarSource SonarLint dashboard with ISPW and Topaz Workbench adds visual displays and reports on COBOL coding errors and complexity. This improves code quality and performance. Detailed analysis and reporting aid identification and correction of problematic coding and code behavior. The modern interface makes it easier for even new-to-COBOL staff to write efficient code.

Finally, the integration of Splunk with Compuware’s Application Audit will collect, index and correlate mainframe operational data. It can be combined with data from other SIEM solutions including non-mainframe operational data. From these IT and enterprise staffs can derive actionable insights into operations via alerts, visualizations, dashboards, reports, etc. Data can also be shared with other modern SIEM solutions.

The Final Word

For 20 consecutive quarters, Compuware has met its 90-day commitment, delivering products and services that make life easier, simpler, and less complex for mainframe developers, admins, operations and security staff. They integrated, innovated and modernized tools that demolished barriers that discouraged or intimidated non-mainframe IT staff from using or learning about the mainframe. They provided access to IT tools/technologies once used only in distributed environments. They automated onerous, time-consuming and error-prone tasks.

No competitor matches their pace of delivery. Their record is impressive, and they have the customer case studies from some of the world’s largest organizations to document their success.

Compuware has proven that an enterprise can succeed when they are willing to take a risk, trust their people, think BIG, risk failure and continuously learn and improve. Congratulations and good luck to them. We look forward to further commenting on their future endeavors.

Monday, October 14, 2019

Do Quantum use cases really exist?

By Rich Ptak

Quantum theory has a long history beginning with an early thought exercise by Democritus[1] (c.460 BC to c.370 BC). Skipping ahead, in 1926[2], we find England’s Winston Churchill reading about quantum theory. Amidst war, in 1941, after a luncheon meeting with scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann, Prime Minister Churchill challenged the physicist to explain quantum theory in words of one syllable – in five minutes. Lindemann did so with seconds to spare. Unfortunately, no one recorded the explanation.

More recently, quantum theory and science are again making news as the era of Quantum Computing (QC) readiness begins. The “readiness” era is marked by expanded QC education, engineering, experimentation and innovation with the goal to determine if, where, and how QC can be leveraged for tangible market benefit. Conventional wisdom holds that practical application of Quantum Computing (QC) remain years, if not decades, away. Interest persists as pioneers continue to expand their efforts with results that are changing opinions. Also note that for the foreseeable future, working quantum systems will be hybrid-systems, i.e. combinations of quantum computers working with classical computers and/or cloud systems.

Savvy vendors recognized that a broad ecosystem of QC-knowledgeable resources and entrepreneurial activities would speed scientific development and build market interest. Emulating earlier efforts[3] to grow (and apply) knowledge through broadly dispersed communication and collaboration, QC advocates began building globally distributed networks open to educators, enterprises and innovators to accelerate the path to commercialization.

Today, multiple vendors, including IBM, D-wave, Rigetti Computing, Google, Intel, Microsoft, AWS and others are conducting research and working to deliver a variety of quantum products and services. These range from chips, software algorithms, quantum simulators and processors to full systems. It should be noted that there is little consistency in the definition of the meaning of a “full stack” quantum product.

That said, the first five provide access to quantum services on quantum computing[4] hardware. IBM delivers quantum systems hardware; Rigetti and D-wave offer services via a full stack” which include real quantum hardware. Intel provides chips for assembly into quantum processors with the expectation of full quantum systems in the next 10 years. Google is developing quantum processors and creating quantum algorithms. Microsoft offers “full stack” quantum software services with a statement of commitment and a promise of quantum hardware in the future. Others offer access to similar software simulating or emulating quantum machines. All work with a variety of partners, collaborators, enterprises, research labs, government and educational institutions. For example, Microsoft has organized the Microsoft Quantum Network [5] (global coalition of individual & enterprise partners, private, Azure services, workshops) providing network access to their quantum “stack” to advance quantum computing progress.

IBM offers IBM Q Network [6] (global, private, for-fee, quantum systems hardware) for enterprise, educational and research efforts. Multi-levels of participation with access to IBM quantum system hardware via the IBM Cloud. IBM also created the IBM Q Experience [7] (global, free, public-access to quantum software and services) offering broad access to a larger public. Recently added is the IBM Quantum Computation Center [8] to meet service demand. IBM offers a complete a set of quantum hardware, software, and cloud-based services that is probably the most expansive and well-structured infrastructure available to the widest variety of quantum interested innovators and explorers.

Rigetti Computing [9] identifies their offering as the first fully commercial quantum computer (others would dispute that). They offer qualified users direct, exclusive, dedicated access to real quantum system hardware, including tech support if desired.

Providers and offerings are increasing and evolving rapidly. Thousands of individuals in enterprises, universities, and research centers are actively acquiring and sharing knowledge, performing experiments, running applications on quantum simulators, chips, systems and/or through clouds. There exists a diverse ecosystem working to discover where and how QC’s problem-solving potential can be used and exploited.

Learning how to leverage QC is advancing more rapidly than earlier anticipated. No, we’re not yet ready to have a quantum solution in every home. Nor, has the “killer app” been discovered. Most likely it will be some time before the quantum equivalent of VisiCalc or MS Windows appears to make QC everyone’s tool. These are the early days of the QC era of experimentation and learning. But expectations are changing as the spectrum of application and realizable benefits becomes more evident.

Community efforts and shared communication are leading to an improved understanding of where to focus QC application activities. Accumulating experience is yielding insights that lead to intellectual property that will provide competitive advantage. Learning quantum computing takes time. It is accessible to those willing to make the effort and the payoff promises to be huge for those who do.

Today, the enterprise business case to initiate quantum-oriented education and efforts has evolved from a speculative need to an absolute necessity. Two sure signs indicate a growing interest in QC. These are:

The number and variety of articles about QC appearing in the business and general press (even if they are not technically accurate).
The proliferation and variety of QC consulting services and resources to help business and technical staffs wanting to acquire QC knowledge as they attempt to identify and evaluate how and where they might use QC.

There is no clear indication which vendor(s) will dominate QC. Several competing building block models for qubits exist. Each has its own merit in addressing the major problems of qubit stability, loss of coherence, shelf-life, error correction, etc. These factors means that the number of qubits [10] available make a very poor metric of performance or comparison. IBM has proposed Quantum Volume, a composite of those problems as a more realistic, comprehensive, vendor-neutral, and coherent metric. As structured Quantum Volume works for any gate and circuit-based quantum computing system.

The next section summarizes conclusions about quantum use cases based on the experience of IBM and IBM Q Network users. Other vendor views will be covered as they become available.

IBM suggested market focus and usage cases

With its IBM Q Network [11] and quantum access [12] via IBM Cloud (IBM Q Experience[13]), IBM has been a leading provider of access to real quantum systems and quantum simulators (very useful for sandbox experimentation and testing). IBM and Q Network participant experiences suggest that near-term applications of QC should focus on:

Improving models of natural physical processes interactions at a molecular level – yield a more detailed understanding of the details of changes, interactions, etc.as well as assessing the impact of external stimuli.
Driving improved solution scenarios – by more efficiently and quickly running multiple simulations quality is improved – more iterations, faster performance, using less but higher quality data.
Improving quality of optimized solutions - run more iterations faster using less, but higher quality data.
Improve AI/ML pattern recognition to increase accuracy and precision. QC allows broader context to identify and test dependencies, relationships, interactions, etc.

IBM also discussed three areas of validated proof of benefit or potential for benefit. IBM usage experts discussed specific results relating to:

Financial Services – as an aid to quantitative financial analysis, e.g. using simulations to create and evaluate models for pricing derivatives;

Chemistry – modeling individual chemical molecular changes during a process, e.g. modeling the process of lithium decay (in a battery) to learn how to extend battery life;

Manufacturing – applies to numerous, highly diverse areas, such as distribution and supply chain optimization, design and creation of new materials with specific desirable characteristics, e.g. strength, durability, flexibility, etc.

Both categories will grow and expand significantly as QC experience and experimentation accumulate. For more on IBM, Rigetti, Google and Microsoft visit the Ptak Associates Technology Blog[14].

Further thoughts on usage

The number and variety of use cases and areas of application is expanding. The pattern for use will be realized in hybrid combinations of classical and quantum systems. QC knowledge can yield benefits in solving classical computing problems. For example, classical algorithms[15] have benefited. Working with quantum algorithms, in many ways distinctly different from classical algorithms, has led to reformulation of classical computing algorithms to run faster and yield more accurate solutions on existing classical computers, even besting the quantum approach.

Summary

Use cases do exist. We repeat, NOW is the time to start on the road to understanding and potentially benefiting from quantum computing’s unique capabilities. Even if specific benefits remain unknown, today’s efforts yield results clearly indicating quantum computing‘s potential to significantly benefit users.

We firmly believe that:

The era of quantum readiness is well underway and expanding rapidly with emerging results and an impressive number of vendor efforts.
QC requires learning and experience to frame problem definition and solution design in quantum terms.
Time and effort invested in QC learning today; will pay off in competitive advantage that will be hard to overcome by latecomers.
For the foreseeable future, progress will be made via hybrid-systems combining quantum computers, classical computers and cloud systems.
QC will radically change how we view, think about, and solve problems while greatly expanding the frontiers of what can be done.

We don’t know who will first deliver TRUE Quantum Advantage defined as a programmable general- purpose computer solving a real problem. The number of competitors is growing. IBM appears to be leading with IBM Q Network, IBM Q, use case scientists and business experience. Their latest move providing a quantum textbook and tutorials reflects their on-going commitment to growing the quantum community. Kudos to them.

Google, Rigetti Software, D-wave, Microsoft, etc. have also demonstrated an ability and willingness to compete. We wish good luck to all. We believe that a functioning quantum hardware platform will be necessary for long-term success.