12.6.16
Compuware Corporation today announced it has acquired the
assets of Standardware, the leading
provider of IMS virtualization technology. Compuware’s third
acquisition this year, Standardware’s COPE technology dramatically
reduces the time, cost and technical difficulty associated with the
development and testing of IMS systems—enabling enterprises to
significantly 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 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.
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 [2], 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 thus include:
* Dramatically improved digital agility for global enterprises in
urgent need of reducing 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, Standardware CEO and
Founder. “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 [3]. “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.”
