Compuware is looking to help ease the application development and maintenance burden mainframe shops face by delivering a new suite of intuitive development tools.
The company’s Compuware Workbench, announced July 20, is an Eclipse-based “development environment for managing mainframe application development.” The workbench features a GUI and tools such as a source code editor, data set administration utilities, job submission and review, and mainframe fault diagnosis.
“IT organizations are constantly faced with two challenges-delivering on their commitments to the business while, at the same time, holding down costs,” Rose Rowe, vice president of mainframe strategy at Compuware, said in a statement. “By increasing productivity, IT organizations can address both of these demands. They can deliver revenue-generating projects on time and meet their service-level agreements without having to add headcount.”
“Workers who chose IT as a profession during the past 20 years have completely different sets of skills, and use different languages and application architectures,” Dale Vecchio, an analyst with Gartner, said in a statement. “Consequently, the pending retirement of the baby boomer generation will have a significant impact on continuing to operate many of the legacy systems that focus on running the business.”
Compuware’s announcement continued:
““As the baby boomer generation looks ahead to retirement, IT organizations face the recruiting and training of potential new programmers. The next generation of programmers, who grew up with digital technologies, have not had experience with the traditional “green screen” (TSO/ISPF) interface. This means that these new programmers would not only have to be trained to understand the applications they will support, but would also be faced with having to learn to support these applications in an outdated character-based development environment. Providing them with this modernized, point-and-click option significantly reduces the time associated with what would otherwise be a costly learning curve.Compuware continues to enable and support the needs of IT’s more experienced developers by offering the choice of either a green screen or GUI environment, giving them the option of using whichever platform best suits their individual needs.The initial release of the Compuware Workbench is scheduled for August of this year. Learn more about the Compuware Workbench at http://www.compuware.com/mainframeinnovations/.”“