BMC has announced support of IBM's DB2 10 for z/OS across its DB2 solutions, according to Robin Reddick, director for MSM solutions marketing at BMC.
BMC has been working with the beta code from IBM and beta customers for over a year, Reddick says. BMC has participated in IBM's beta program to make sure that it had all the early technical information and worked on its products to ensure that they are going to be compatible with DB2 V10, she adds. BMC also has shared customers with IBM that have participated in the beta program.
There is "certainly plenty of interest" in moving to version 10, says Reddick, citing BMC's annual survey of customers that helps evaluate where to invest R&D resources. Large shops are actually the ones that are most anxious to move, with about 70% of the large shops planning on being on DB2 version 10 within 18 months of its release. Fifty-four percent of those large shops are currently on version 9. Within the general population of all shops - small, medium, and large - there is a notable difference in the number, with 24% of all of the companies in BMC's survey planning on being on version 10 within six to 18 months, says Reddick. With this information, one can infer that the small-to-medium shops don't have the same sense of urgency that the large shops do, which makes sense given the data volumes that the large shops deal with, she notes.
There is a solid commitment to the mainframe among customers, and overwhelming support for efforts to reduce the cost of IT, investments in zIIP engines, and things that make IT more efficient and more cost-effective, according to BMC. The DB2 solutions offered by BMC are intended to enable customers to reduce costs, minimize costly downtime, overcome staffing constraints, focus on business-critical issues, and ensure that critical data is performing optimally.
BMC Software this year has unveiled several mainframe initiatives over the past year, including the enablement of many of its MAINVIEW, IMS and DB2 for z/OS solutions to take advantage of zIIP specialty engines to reduce operational costs;
Fast Path Online Restructure/EP to reduce critical database downtime and avoid costly outages; IBM zEnterprise support with BMC's BSM platform enabling customers to manage the new zEnterprise and all other cross-enterprise components; and BMC Control-M 7, which automates the management of dynamic workloads across the mainframe and distributed enterprise.
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