The mainframe IT sector still makes news once in a while. Compuware Corp. on Dec. 6 announced that it has acquired the assets of Standardware, a longtime provider of IMS virtualization for mainframe systems.
Terms of the transaction were not released. Standardware is Compuware’s third acquisition in calendar year 2016.
IMS (Information Management System) is a database and transaction management system that was first introduced by IBM for its mainframe computers in 1968.
Standardware’s COPE (computer operating and programming environment) software reduces the time, cost and technical difficulty associated with the development and testing of IMS systems. This enables enterprises to increase their digital business agility while better enabling less mainframe-experienced staff to perform IMS-related DevOps tasks.
IMS remains a deeply foundational database and transaction management technology for systems of record at large global enterprises, especially in industries such as banking, insurance, airlines and others. Its stability, dependability and high efficiency at scale make it particularly valuable as a back-end resource for high-traffic customer-facing apps, Compuware said.
Conventional approaches to the development and testing of IMS systems can be excessively slow, technically challenging and very expensive. The set-up of IMS application development environments with dedicated IMS regions and databases is especially time-consuming, requiring resources to be defined and compiled for each instance—and at every stage of development, testing, training and systems integration.
Worse yet, these tasks typically require DBAs and system programmers with IMS-specific skills—an increasingly problematic and costly constraint given the generational shift in IT. These issues can be even more problematic for sites that outsource their z/OS environments, Compuware said.
The result of these bottlenecks and resource constraints is that large enterprises can find themselves far less nimble than their smaller competitors and unable to leverage their current IMS assets to respond to digital requirements.
Detroit-based Compuware is addressing this bottleneck by acquiring Standardware, including the COPE product line. With this acquisition, Compuware now enables enterprises to rapidly deploy multiple virtual IMS environments to as many different active projects as they require without having to create costly new IMS instances or engage professionals with scarce technical skill-sets. The result is greater digital agility across all tiers of the enterprise architecture, from front-end systems of engagement to back-end systems of record.
COPE is already well integrated with Compuware Xpediter, an automated debugging solution. Unlike other debugging tools with single-threaded architecture, Xpediter can be fluidly used within the Standardware virtualized environment.