In IT, we’ve been fixing company problems large and small for decades and meeting the challenges of highly technical demands, whatever they may be. But now we have a major problem of our own. It’s a labor shortage that’s nothing short of a crisis. And it demands the same kind of innovative solutions we’re used to delivering every day in our jobs.
Mass media for some time has been bringing us the story of the IT shortage that looms before us. The headlines all seem to be the…
CA Performance Management Enables Service Provider to Enhance its Commitment to Offering an Exceptional Customer Experience
CA Technologies has announced that Integra (F/K/A Integra Telecom), a provider of fiber-based, enterprise-grade networking, communications and technology solutions, has deployed CA Performance Management (CA PM), the core network and systems monitoring product in the company’s converged infrastructure management solution.
Integra uses CA PM to monitor, analyze and report the real-time…
Worldwide IT operations management (ITOM) software revenue totalled $18 billion in 2012, up 4.8 per cent from $17 billion in 2011, according to final results from Gartner, Inc. However, Gartner said that the "Big Four" ITOM vendors - IBM, CA Technologies, BMC Software and HP - surrendered market share in 2012, while a new generation of ITOM vendors grew significantly faster than the market.
"Vendor revenue in the 2012 ITOM software market demonstrated moderate single-digit growth, after two consecutive years of nearly double-digit growth, due in part to slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition (M&A) activity," said Laurie…
Two New Hadoop Offerings and DMX Innovations Bring Benefits of Better ETL through Hadoop and Better Hadoop with Enhanced ETL
Syncsort, a global leader in Big Data integration solutions, today announced the availability of its Spring '13 release, including two brand new Hadoop products and breakthrough enhancements to DMX that turn Hadoop into a more robust, feature rich and easy-to-use ETL solution.
Big Data is prompting organizations to look at Hadoop to process more data in less time and for less money, but Hadoop is not yet a complete ETL solution. Syncsort's two new offerings…
Enterprise Executive recently caught up with Brocade Communications (Brocade) CEO Lloyd Carney to discuss the company’s long history of providing networking technologies supporting both ESCON and FICON, its relationship with IBM and growth opportunities in the mainframe market.
Enterprise Executive: Lloyd, please tell us a little about Brocade.
Lloyd Carney: Brocade is a company forged out of the data center that has delivered networking technologies in the most mission-critical IT environments throughout our 17-year history. We’re a pure-play networking company with…
There’s more than one way to save on CPU consumption. Moving workloads to System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) engines has been a popular option. However, many organizations are also exploring using IBM’s DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) as an option for lowering costs and optimizing the performance of the mainframe. IDAA is a specialty machine that offers faster and more predictable response times for long-running, unpredictable queries. It does this by reducing database tuning efforts and off-loading query workloads. If you’re looking into moving workloads to IDAA, here are some important factors to…
The University of Florida (UF) sought to help students stay connected with university activities and news. With 50,000 students and staff using smartphones—and that number rising quickly—the Gainesville, FL, university realized it needed to develop an information-rich mobile Web application. An IBM System z mobile technology solution provided the foundation for its UF Mobile Web.
The heart of the UF Mobile Web is the Integrated Student Information System, which keeps students on track with class schedules, required textbooks, academic dates and information, grades and important announcements. In addition, a live interactive map of the…
According to a 2011 “IBM Tech Trends Report,” these are the top concerns: 1. Security/Privacy (53 percent) 2. Cost of developing for multiplatform (52 percent) 3. Integrating cloud service with mobile (51 percent).
The IT industry is undergoing a mobile transformation as the explosion of mobile devices in the marketplace has driven service providers, such as banks and utility companies, to offer mobile applications. The proliferation of mobile devices brings a new raft of challenges to application developers as they do battle with competing platforms, frameworks and technologies—and this is just on the mobile device. This doesn’t even begin to address the additional complexity of connecting…
As companies continue to rely on the cloud to deliver their more business-critical systems, they must consider how much they can trust this new paradigm. For a cloud solution to be robust enough to host the most important systems, it must be built on top of a virtualization stack that can deliver the necessary service levels.
You may have in-house, non-cloud solutions that provide five 9s uptime and adhere to the strictest levels of security, but when moved to the cloud, public or private, you may be concerned that you won’t be able to get…
Consider System z for the cloud because it’s:
1. Reliable. Even cloud solutions need robust platforms. 2. Flexible. It runs the same Linux that you run on lesser platforms. 3. Cost-effective. It can be an extremely cost-effective platform. 4. Virtualized. Nothing virtualizes like a mainframe. 5. z/OS-connected. It’s unbeatable if you need to communicate with z/OS.
Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company delivering a new generation of APM, announced today the convergence of dynaTracePurePath® Technology and the Gomez Performance Network, creating the industry's most powerful User Experience Management (UEM) solution. Compuware now offers the industry's only APMaaS solution that provides a complete UEM…
Batch processing is traditionally used for reconciling and reporting transactions at the end of the day, week, month or quarter. It’s used in many business activities from payment processing to bill-ing, stock control, credit scoring, interest calculations and more. Batch applications have proved over the years to be an efficient, reliable method for bulk processing of updates to data.
Batch applications sometimes require exclusive access to resources in order to make them effi-cient to run and they typically share business logic online. Batch processing is usually accom-plished through automated processes that remove resources in CICS,…
Enterprise Executive sat down with Rich Guski, who recently retired from IBM, to get his insight into current and future security trends he sees. Rich was a key participant in RACF security development and also the architect of several CICS security functions that shipped with RACF for z/OS 1.10 during his 27-year tenure with IBM. He’s also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), as defined by the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2. Enterprise Executive: Rich, what are you currently doing now that you&rsquo…
HostBridge Technology, provider of high-precision Web services integration and optimization software for CICS® and System z®, has released HostBridge v6.62. Complementing recent enhancements in CICS TS V5.1, HostBridge v6.62 helps organizations increase efficiency and service agility when using CICS, CICS socket applications, and DB2® in enterprise integration.
“Our customers integrate CICS applications with Web, cloud, and mobile resources,” Russ Teubner, HostBridge CEO, said, “and they always look for better ways to increase efficiency and reduce TCO. To help achieve these objectives, we maintain strong relationships with IBM product groups and engineer…
IBM announced new servers using the newest POWER7+ chip in October 2012. The plus (+) designation is an approach IBM has used before; most recently with the POWER6+, and before that with POWER5+, to signify chip enhancements short of a full chip revision. POWER7+ provides some substantial improvements, but those expecting POWER8, which IBM has been telegraphing for months, will be disappointed. Still, there’s much in POWER7+ to help Power shops improve overall system performance.
POWER7+ today is the most powerful chip IBM offers in the Power line. The plus version increases the number of virtual machines…
Each day, mainframe applications support billions of online banking and mobile device-initiated e-commerce transactions across the globe. These applications are often deceivingly simple on the front-end—hit a few keys on your phone and a few days later a package arrives in the mail. We tend to take the stability and reliability of mainframe applications for granted, but the fact is these applications are highly complex. They require massive amounts of development, testing and quality assurance work within short periods of time to bring high-quality software products to market quickly.
At the same time that mobile…
There was a time when IT determined the computing services that business users were allowed to have and how those services would be accessed. Those days are long gone. With the advent of mobile devices and social media, the center of gravity has shifted, and users are driving IT to behave differently and deliver computing services in new ways. This phenomenon has been coined “the consumerization of IT,” and it has far-reaching effects on the IT organization, including the choices that IT makes for infrastructure and automation tools.
Last week I had the honor of joining other mainframers for an annual sales kick off meeting, marking the beginning of our (Compuware’s) fiscal year. While attending this year, I had the following observations about folks in mainframe sales, the state of IT and the power of connection.
About Mainframe Sales
You can teach an old dog a new trick. (I’m one of those old dogs, so it’s OK.) With the introduction of new application performance technology that shows the impact of distributed activity in mainframe environments,…
Java application performance is critical for all companies as they shift more development to object-oriented languages. Much more than just a programming language, Java is a powerful platform with a complete set of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for all types of distributed, complex applications. Widely popular and considered by some as the COBOL of the 21st century, Java runs almost anywhere, on top of existing platforms and is ideal for:
• Programming in the networked, heterogeneous world • Developing and deploying Web-based and e-commerce applications • Integrating legacy technologies • Programming hand-held devices, phones and sensors. …
