Compuware has formed new partnerships intended to help mainframe enterprises better manage their environments, both with DevOps and with security and compliance.
The vendor is integrating with JIRA Software, a team-planning and project-management solution, to help enterprises bring mainframe applications into the world of mainstream DevOps. This integration will help bring about unified issue management across all platforms and applications, including mainframes. The solution also provides technical guidance for mainstream developers with limited mainframe knowledge.
“Large enterprises that fail to bring Agile and DevOps best practices to their high-value COBOL applications will remain competitively disadvantaged against smaller, nimbler market disrupters,” said Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley. “Those that succeed at making their mainframes nimble, on the other hand, will combine the competitive advantages of being big and being fast.”
The initial integration will automatically generate an issue in JIRA Software when Compuware Abend-AID or Compuware Strobe detects a problem. Any developer then tasked with that issue in JIRA Software can automatically start a Compuware Topaz Workbench debugging session, pre-configured to address the precise point in the application where the problem occurs.
The integration of Compuware’s mainframe solutions with JIRA Software is intended to help enterprises unify their agile workflows across all code running on all platforms. The result will be a common environment for planning sprints and distributing tasks across multiple software teams, tracking team progress and re-allocating resources in the context of business requirements, executing and documenting releases, and reporting on team performance for continuous process improvement.
Compuware also announced a partnership with Splunk, intended to help enterprises better discover and resolve security and compliance issues across large multi-platform IT environments by feeding mainframe application usage insight to Splunk Enterprise.
Many large enterprises use Splunk Enterprise to capture and analyze the wealth of data generated by their computer systems, networks, storage devices, applications, and other IT resources. By quickly and automatically detecting patterns and anomalies in this “big data,” IT staffs can act much more responsively to address potential cyber-threats and operational issues.
“As long as IT is forced to continue treating the mainframe as an isolated operational silo, it will struggle with the inefficiencies and inaccuracies of fragmented security information and event management,” said O’Malley. “By enabling IT to converge mainframe metrics into their broader multi-platform Splunk deployments, Compuware is eliminating this silo and empowering enterprise IT to substantially improve its security and compliance outcomes.”
Compuware is adding significant value to these Splunk deployments by capturing and delivering complete, accurate insight into who is accessing mainframe applications and exactly how they are using them.
This mainframe insight, captured by Compuware Hiperstation for application auditing, enables enterprise IT organizations to unify and complete their Splunk Enterprise SIEM environments. With complete auditing data from all IT resources across all platforms, these organizations can much more effectively and efficiently discover and respond to behavioral anomalies that indicate a security event or exposure, correlate logs and other data for comprehensive compliance reporting, and provide forensic evidence when called upon.
Compuware also announced an alliance with SonarSource, intended to help enterprises protect and increase the long-term value of their mainframe applications by giving mainframe-inexperienced developers with mainstream programming skills the ability to rapidly deliver quality COBOL code and simplifying smart management of agile mainframe development activities.
“Large enterprises must move quickly to safeguard the long-term integrity of their mainframe applications as their senior COBOL specialists retire—and they must more aggressively leverage their mainframe application logic to enhance their digital customer engagement,” said O’Malley. “We’re helping large enterprises achieve these objectives by empowering their existing IT staffs to more rapidly, effectively, and efficiently enhance mainframe code.”
For more details, go to www.compuware.com.