DEVOPSdigest

Compuware Corporation has acquired the assets of Standardware, a provider of IMS virtualization technology.

Compuware’s third acquisition this year, Standardware’s COPE technology reduces the time, cost and technical difficulty associated with the development and testing of IMS systems — enabling enterprises to increase their digital business agility, while also 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 more. Its stability, dependability and high efficiency at scale make it particularly valuable as a back-end resource for high-traffic customer-facing apps.

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 resource consumptive, requiring each resource to be defined and compiled for each instance, as well as at every stage of development, testing, training and systems integration work. Adding to these bottlenecks, DBAs and system programmers with IMS-specific skills must be enlisted—an increasingly problematic and expensive resource constraint given the generational shift in IT. These constraints are magnified for sites that outsource their z/OS environment.

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.

Compuware is addressing this bottleneck by acquiring the assets of 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, the premier automated debugging solution. Unlike other debugging tools with single threaded architecture, Xpediter can be fluidly used within the Standardware virtualized environment.

Benefits to customers will thus include:

- Dramatically improved digital agility for large global enterprises in urgent need of reducing significant technical debt

- The ability to secure greater business value and competitive differentiation from IMS-based data and application logic

- Successful transition of mainframe stewardship from retiring Baby Boomer specialists to less specifically mainframe-experienced Millennials

- Significant reductions in TCO for mainframe IMS applications and data

“Compuware is clearly the most qualified company in the industry to lead Standardware and COPE customers to the future of Agile mainframe and cross-platform DevOps,” said Dave Evans, CEO and Founder, Standardware. “We believe that this acquisition best serves the needs of the entire IMS installed base worldwide.”

Acquiring the COPE technology follows on the heels of multiple acquisitions, solution roll-outs and partnerships that Compuware has been executing at a pace unprecedented in the once-moribund mainframe market. The velocity of these actions and their laser-like focus on the real-world challenges faced by mainframe-owning enterprises definitively demonstrate Compuware’s industry leadership.

“COPE perfectly complements Compuware’s existing portfolio of mainframe Agile- and DevOps-enablement,” said Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley. “Within Compuware, we’ve created an Agile, well-oiled business platform where transformation can occur quickly by design. We will continue to do whatever it takes to make sure our customers can modernize and mainstream their mainframe development, testing and operations so that they can reap the competitive advantages of being both big and fast.”