IBM intends to acquire EZ Legacy Ltd., an Israel-based application discovery company. The company’s technology helps developers to understand and change mainframe code based on data displayed on a dashboard and other visualizations in order to ease the process of modernizing applications, exposing APIs and more efficiently leveraging development resources.
The planned acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016 subject to completion of governmental review and customary closing conditions. Terms of the deal were not released.
“The mainframe is the backbone of today’s businesses. As clients drive their digital transformation, they are seeking the innovation and business value from new applications while leveraging their existing assets and processes,” said Ross A. Mauri, general manager, IBM z Systems. “By adding EZSource’s technology to our enterprise DevOps and API management offerings, we are making it easier and faster for developers to modernize key applications that previously were manually intensive and many times required specialized skills."
According to IBM, with 80% of enterprises expected to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy by next year, IT departments are looking for new ways to reconcile the applications that reside on enterprise systems of record to digital forms of engagement such as mobile and social. Today’s applications can be made up of millions of lines of code, and to update this code can take days or weeks. Moreover, 68% of the world’s production IT workloads run on the mainframe, which adds up to roughly 30 billion business transactions processed by the system each day, including most major credit card and banking transactions and stock trades, says IBM.
As organizations move toward digital transformation and enter the API economy, connecting business-critical applications running on mainframes with mobile and cloud applications to better engage with customers becomes more important. A key step in this evolution is to understand what assets already exist in the enterprise.
IBM’s current DevOps offerings, such as IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z Systems and IBM Rational Team Concert, coupled with EZSource’s application discovery technology, are designed to enable developers to evolve those legacy assets at the speed of business with reduced risk to the enterprise. EZSource alerts developers to the number of sections of code that access a particular entity, such as a database table, so they can easily check them to see if updates are needed. Without the advanced analytics in the EZSource solution, developers would need to manually check thousands or millions of lines of code in hopes that they would find the ones that need to be changed, putting all entities at greater risk of error.
EZSource’s offerings that discover and analyze application components and interdependencies to accelerate planning and transformation with reduced disruption will complement its own strengths in digital transformation, APIs, hybrid cloud and enterprise DevOps, IBM stated.
To learn more about EZSource, go to www.ezsource.com.
To learn more about the IBM z Systems portfolio, visit www.ibm.com/systems/z.