eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
BMC Software, a veteran independent enterprise IT products and services maker that long ago carved out its own loyal clientele in the face of larger competitors, has had a busy news week.
The Houston-based company revealed March 2 that will acquire Compuware, once the largest tech company in Michigan and since 1973 a provider of mainframe application development, delivery and support solutions. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the next few months; the price was reported to be $2 billion.
BMC, which like Compuware (Thoma Bravo) is owned by a private equity firm (KKR), also announced major additions and improvements to its Helix systems operations platform, which it describes as “the industry’s first and only intelligence-enriched, integrated service and operations platform.” Details are further down in this story.
Addition of Compuware Improves Mainframe Mojo
BMC’s expertise in mainframe technology is evident in the Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) platform, as well as additional product areas. The company said that the acquisition “will build upon these technologies to deliver new solutions to serve enterprise organizations worldwide.”
Additionally, as data storage becomes more critical to enterprise DevOps strategies, the synergies between these two organizations will become more integral to customer success, BMC said.
Compuware has been an industry leader in mainstreaming the mainframe for agile and DevOps developers, and as more organizations adopt new-generation mainframe solutions, the combined innovation that both companies bring will help accelerate successful digital transformation for customers, BMC said.
In a media advisory, Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley praised the pending sale to BMC. “Without a doubt, a combined BMC and Compuware is the best, brightest and most collaborative (partnership) for a new generation of mainframe stewards,” O’Malley said.
New feature lineup for BMC Helix
The new v20.02 version of BMC Helix, announced March 2, includes the following features, among others:
BMC Helix Monitor
Monitor is the next evolution in BMC’s monitoring and event management solutions, combining proven ITOM capabilities with a modern, cloud-native architecture to ensure ease of use, high performance and time to value:
- SaaS solution for monitoring and event management across on-prem, multi-cloud, and container environments with a customizable user experience.
- Containerized microservices architecture provides elastic scalability and enterprise-grade high availability and performance.
- High-performance ITOM data lake for large scale operational data analytics supported by a Cassandra and Elasticsearch backend.
BMC Helix Discovery
Enhancements to visibility into hardware, software, and service dependencies across environments include:
- Discover z/OS Mainframe dependencies.
- Cisco ACI software defined network infrastructure model added to Technology Knowledge Update (TKU)
BMC Helix ITSM
Enhancements give further intelligence to service and operations management, along with tools to measure service and operational metrics:
- Enhanced cognitive automation between service desk and operational security for faster management and resolution of events.
- Intelligent DevOps change request creation with automatic sync updates to help accelerate speed and quality of deployments.
- Augmented reports to identify automated work along with manual, and templates to measure automation initiative metrics.
BMC Helix Remediate
Enhancements to automate cloud and on-prem server security and improve discovery and management of vulnerabilities.
- Identifies cloud server instances and installs the TrueSight Automation for Servers agent to provide a single solution for automated on-premises and cloud server security and compliance.
- Integrations provide blind spot detection and closed-loop change and configuration management.
- Uses vulnerability noise reduction to remove vulnerabilities from scanner data that have already been, or are planned to be, remediated, for greater speed and ease of use.
BMC Helix Optimize
Enhancements to cost visibility, customization, and resource analysis:
- Cost visibility for private clouds: Gain visibility into private cloud costs, allowing budget and project owners to see both public and private cloud resource cost in a single view.
- Customized cost of services: Apply discounts to the cost of cloud services to reflect the true cost of services to the organization.
- Deeper insights: Extended 24-month analysis period that now includes integration with Cloud Foundry and Nutanix Acropolis data collection for planning and identifying resource constraints that could impact your business.
These are only a few of the new enhancements. Go here for more details.