Innovative Cloud Access to Mainframe Development

Compuware made Topaz, its flagship solution for mainframe Agile/DevOps, available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This marks the industry's first cloud access to modern mainframe development, enabling enterprises to deploy agile tools for COBOL and other core codebases in minutes.

Through Topaz on AWS, which leverages Amazon AppStream 2.0 technology, enterprises can provide their global development, test and ops teams with immediate and secure cloud access to Compuware's entire innovative mainframe Agile/DevOps solution stack. Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed, secure application streaming service that allows users to stream desktop applications from AWS to any device running a web browser.

Customers now have the choice of deploying Topaz on-premise or on AWS. Cloud-based deployment of Topaz provides many benefits-including significantly faster implementation, simple administration, a virtual integrated development environment (IDE), adaptive capacity, and immediate developer access to software updates. The last of these is important, since unlike traditional mainframe solutions vendors, Compuware aggressively delivers innovative new capabilities to customers every 90 days.

Compuware is addressing the critical need to leverage modern Agile and DevOps best practices for the mainframe by making its innovative solutions available to enterprise customers via Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Compuware's patent pending technology provides an intuitive, streamlined configuration menu that leverages AWS best practices and makes it easy for IT admins to quickly configure secure connectivity between Topaz on AWS and their mainframe environment, as well as their existing cross-platform enterprise DevOps toolchains running on-premise, in the cloud or both.

Large enterprises are struggling to bring Agile and DevOps best practices to their core systems of record, which are written in COBOL and other codebases running on IBM Z mainframes. This mainframe transformation is essential-because their ability to compete with "digital first" market disrupters is largely contingent on their ability to continuously adapt back-end systems to ever-changing market realities.

Compuware uniquely enables this mainframe transformation with innovative solutions that facilitate Agile and DevOps on the mainframe-while also supporting the full integration of mainframe Agile/DevOps into enterprise customers' broader multi-platform DevOps initiatives.

With the introduction of Topaz on AWS, mainframe DevOps teams can now tap the power of cloud to:

• Modify, test and debug COBOL, PL/I, Assembler and other mainframe code via an Eclipse-based virtual IDE
• Visualize complex and/or undocumented application logic and data relationships
• Manage source code and promote artifacts through the DevOps lifecycle
• Perform common tasks such as job submission, review, print and purge
• Leverage a single data editor to discover, visualize, edit, compare, and protect mainframe files and data

As a result, enterprise mainframe teams can rapidly liberate themselves from the oppression of traditional waterfall-bound mainframe tools, which have become a major impediment to enterprise agility.

"Modernizing mainframe applications is a critical activity for enterprise organizations competing in a digital-first world. That starts with integrating mainframes into continuous delivery pipelines, but it also means modernizing the development environment to ensure that developers have the scale and agility they need in a fast-moving market," said Charles Araujo, Principal Analyst with Intellyx. "With Topaz on AWS, Compuware gives enterprises all the benefits of their intuitive, innovative development framework and combines it with the scale, flexibility and ease-of-administration of AWS. That's a winning combination."

Compuware solutions also solve the serious problem enterprises face as their most experienced mainframe development and operations staff exit the workforce to retirement-since it enables new generations of IT professionals who lack extensive mainframe- and COBOL-specific expertise to easily and effectively handle mainframe-related duties.

Compuware also announced today that they are working with CloudBees to streamline mainframe DevOps and facilitate digital transformation across all platforms.

"Large enterprises cannot survive if they complacently accept the mainframe status quo," said Compuware CEO Chris O'Malley. "By leveraging the cloud to bring Agile and DevOps to their core COBOL apps, large enterprises can more quickly and easily adapt the mainframe and continue reaping its full benefits as the most powerful, secure, cost-efficient and adaptive systems of record platform in the universe for executing application logic, running high-performance databases and processing financial transactions."