BMC Partners with Compuware on IBM z Systems
February 17, 2015
Share this

Compuware Corporation and BMC Software. are partnering to improve the economics of IBM z Systems ownership. By doing so, the two companies are empowering customers to significantly reduce mainframe opex — even as they more aggressively leverage their high-value mainframe applications, data and processing capacity to meet the challenges of the digital economy.

Mainframe workloads are growing significantly as web, mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) applications drive increasing transaction volumes. Capabilities offered on the newly-debuted IBM z13 are also likely to attract new workloads — including high-performance analytics, Java and Linux. This workload growth is precipitously driving up the Monthly License Charge (MLC) for IBM mainframe software, which for sub-capacity environments is generally impacted by the highest rolling four-hour average (R4HA) of mainframe utilization for all applications on each LPAR—measured in MSUs. Therefore IT can most effectively reduce its sizable IBM z Systems software costs by both 1) tuning each application to minimize its individual consumption of mainframe resources and 2) orchestrating application workloads to minimize the LPAR utilization peaks they generate collectively at any given time.

“The partnership between BMC and Compuware launches an integrated opportunity for mainframe customers to manage workload inefficiencies in a manner that has not been achievable to-date,” said Frank DeSalvo, former research director at Gartner. “This innovation helps organizations leverage their IT budgets by enabling them to continuously optimize their mainframe workloads, resulting in cost effective decisions for both current and future spending.”

BMC and Compuware are uniquely enabling customers to achieve these outcomes by integrating three complementary solutions:

- BMC Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise is a financially intelligent workload management solution that enables customers to identify MLC cost drivers and take appropriate measures to reduce those costs—such as moving workloads to non-peak periods, running IBM subsystems on fewer LPARs, and capping LPAR utilization.

- BMC MainView provides real-time identification of application performance issues, enabling customers to quickly eliminate wasteful MSU consumption.

- Compuware Strobe delivers deep, granular and highly actionable insight into the behavior of application code in the IBM z Systems environment, allowing mainframe owners to quickly pinpoint inefficient sub-routines that can cause MSU consumption to be 20x or more greater than necessary.

One integration allows BMC Cost Analyzer to call Compuware Strobe for a detailed analysis of the specific application component for peak MLC periods, enabling customers to proactively tune applications that have the greatest impact on their monthly software licensing costs. A second integration with BMC MainView allows customers to either automatically or manually invoke Strobe performance analysis — empowering mainframe staffs to more quickly, efficiently and consistently perform cost-saving tuning tasks.

“BMC and Compuware have helped drive mainframe technology for decades, and today we are two of the most innovative companies delivering new solutions on the mainframe platform,” said Bill Miller, President, ZSolutions and Select Technologies for BMC. “The integration of our key solutions helps mainframe customers achieve even greater cost efficiencies as they cope with the challenging combination of intensifying business demand and tight resource constraints.”

“Customers are facing the loss of their most skilled and experienced mainframe staff at the same time as the opportunities and challenges of mainframe ownership are on the rise,” said Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley. “BMC and Compuware are responding to this urgent market need by innovating and collaborating in a way that is unprecedented among mainframe ISVs — and that directly addresses the twin issues of improving the mainframe’s performance economics and simplifying mainframe operations for a new generation of IT professionals.”

The integrations are the first of several the two companies plan as part of a broader partnership that also includes use of each other’s technology within their own organizations.

Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2024

Nearly all (99%) globa IT decision makers, regardless of region or industry, recognize generative AI's (GenAI) transformative potential to influence change within their organizations, according to The Elastic Generative AI Report ...

March 27, 2024

Agent-based approaches to real user monitoring (RUM) simply do not work. If you are pitched to install an "agent" in your mobile or web environments, you should run for the hills ...

March 26, 2024

The world is now all about end-users. This paradigm of focusing on the end-user was simply not true a few years ago, as backend metrics generally revolved around uptime, SLAs, latency, and the like. DevOps teams always pitched and presented the metrics they thought were the most correlated to the end-user experience. But let's be blunt: Unless there was an egregious fire, the correlated metrics were super loose or entirely false ...

March 25, 2024

This year, New Relic published the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance Report to share insights derived from the 2023 Observability Forecast on the adoption and business value of observability across the financial services industry (FSI) and insurance sectors. Here are seven key takeaways from the report ...

March 22, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and AIOps ...

March 21, 2024

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value ...

March 20, 2024

Today, as enterprises transcend into a new era of work, surpassing the revolution, they must shift their focus and strategies to thrive in this environment. Here are five key areas that organizations should prioritize to strengthen their foundation and steer themselves through the ever-changing digital world ...

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...