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critical to set new goals fixated on improving mainframe software delivery—for both employees and customers—awash with outdated, platform unique, unintegrated tools with incompatible interfaces.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.