BMC Software, a provider of system management software, has introduced a new tool intended to help companies decrease their IBM mainframe software expenses by more than 20%. With its new Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise, BMC says it is able to deliver predictive analytics that can help IT departments plan, report and reduce their mainframe licensing charge by identifying system peaks, and recommending preemptive cost-reduction strategies. After deploying the BMC Cost Analyzer, BMC says, a typical customer consuming 5,000 MIPS (million instructions per second) – at an annual cost of $3.6 million – could save $720,000 or more with the new BMC solution.
In a separate announcement, BMC also announced it is operating under new ownership. The vendor was recently acquired by a private investor group led by Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital together with Insight Venture Partners, GIC Special Investments Pte Ltd, and Elliott Management Corporation. As a result of the transaction, now complete, BMC common stock will no longer be listed for trading on NASDAQ.
BMC Cost Analyzer is targeted at the majority of IBM mainframe customers, who are paying for their core IBM software on a usage basis which is determined by the monthly peak usage over a four-hour average, Jay Lipovich, director of Solutions Marketing, BMC Software, told 5 Minute Briefing in an interview. The total budget for this software is typically 30% to 35% of the entire mainframe budget, which for a small shop could be $10,000 a month and for a very large shop it could be up to several million dollars a month, he says.
The challenge for customers in attempting to bring costs down is two-fold, Lipovich says. First, the licensing model itself is complex, and second, the individual products have different pricing, they peak at different times, and additional usage factors come into play – making remediation difficult. In many cases, Lipovich notes, companies have set up teams to try to figure out what is going on during peaks with the goal of reducing the peak since, if they can reduce that, they can reduce next month’s bill.
BMC Cost Analyzer does two things, according to Lipovich. It provides analysis of the cost and utilization data that is produced by the system and presents a picture of the costs and the cost drivers, enabling customers to understand for example which licensed products are driving their costs and below that, which workloads on which LPARs are responsible for that.
The analyzer also enables customers to do what-if analysis to see how changing workloads could affect costs and how much benefit there would be. This includes looking at what would happen, for example if certain non-critical work was not running during the peak, or what would happen to costs if they used defined capacity and capped the work at a specific level.
The result, says Lipovich, is that companies gain valuable insight into what can be done, the accuracy to know what will happen, and the confidence to act to reduce mainframe costs.
More information is available about BMC Cost Analyzer for zEnterprise.