CA Technologies Updates Mainframe Solutions, Promoting an Open and Intelligent Platform for Hybrid Environments

CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) today announced updates to its mainframe solutions that are designed to accelerate modernisation and integration initiatives, allowing enterprises to leverage mainframes as strategic enablers of digital transformation to drive revenue growth. These new and enhanced offerings enable customers to use intelligence and automation to maximise resources and protect data while working with the latest technologies and open innovations, across hybrid environments.

“Mainframes are an integral part of any hybrid IT environment where workloads should run on platforms that provide the best advantage,” said Greg Lotko, general manager, Mainframe, CA Technologies. “Only CA can bring a more simplified user experience that spans the breadth of open DevOps and machine learning-based operational intelligence to make the mainframe an agile, integrated part of an evolving IT architectural landscape.”

“We’ve found CA’s tools to be flexible, easy to use and cost-effective for a dynamic workforce that includes developers and mainframers,” said Jim Magnus, vice president of partner development at Ensono, a leading hybrid IT services provider and CA partner. “Our work and relationship with CA Technologies is vital to driving digital transformation for our clients. We believe the company is making the right investments in mainframe innovations to help clients optimise and modernise their hybrid IT environments.”

Modernising development and operations for more efficient innovation

CA Technologies, a founding contributor of the Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe initiative, is making the core elements of its CA Brightside solution and the API Remediation code base open source through Eclipse Public License 2.0, which encourages collaboration and innovation  opportunities for the IBM® z/OS® platform. CA Brightside, designed to make it easy to integrate the mainframe into enterprise DevOps workflows, allows development teams to control, script and build for the mainframe like any other cloud platform, using familiar open source tools, such as Jenkins, Gradle and IntelliJ, thru a command line interface. Releasing the code via public domain enables a broader community to contribute new innovations and improvements, while further strengthening the mainframe platform and ecosystem.

“We are excited that CA Technologies has formally released the code through the Eclipse Public License,” said John Mertic, director, Open Mainframe Project. “This demonstrates a strong commitment to grow and develop the Zowe framework in support of the open community model. At the same time, it is a critical step to ensuring ongoing innovation so that mainframe customers gain access to the latest technologies.”

For enterprises struggling to keep pace with agile development and DevOps methodologies while dealing with limited resources, updates to CA’s leading Continuous Testing solutions provide mainframe organisations with testing capabilities that enable faster delivery of higher quality software. Development teams can more efficiently conduct software tests by virtualising mainframe environments with CA Service Virtualisation; conduct functional and performance testing with CA BlazeMeter; and create test data that never leaves the mainframe with CA Test Data Manager.

IT operations leaders are managing increasingly complex environments that span from the mainframe to a range of cloud and distributed platforms. CA Operational Intelligence – recently introduced as part of CA’s AI Ops-driven platform – provides comprehensive service intelligence, analyses diverse structured and unstructured data sources from the cloud to the mainframe to help IT operations teams act on potential issues much earlier, isolate root causes faster and ultimately remediate issues before they impact the business.

Leveraging mainframe data and applications to drive new innovative apps and engagements with customers means enterprises are dealing with greater exposure to compliance risks.  Compliance is an issue that affects all data and processes, so it’s critical to have simplified solutions that can fully analyse risk exposure on the mainframe. New machine-learning capabilities in CA Data Content Discovery simplifies the creation of custom analytics and data classifiers to enable much higher levels of accuracy, automates the discovery of new data as it is generated to address compliance issues at scale, and improves visualisation of key insights to make it easier for mainframe and non-mainframe IT staff to easily understand potential risks across mainframe data infrastructures.

For more on how CA Technologies is helping enterprises optimise their infrastructures end-to-end from mobile to mainframes, visit www.ca.com/mainframe and the blog, “Zowe: Increasing the Power of Hybrid IT Through Open Source”.