Compuware Addresses New Normal of Mainframe Risks

Compuware (News - Alert) Corporation, a provider of mainframe solutions, has initiated several upgrades to its products that will help its customers confront the business risks of the "New Normal of Mainframe" by encouraging developer productivity and improving application performance management.

With the rise in mobile banking and other kinds of e-commerce, mainframe applications have become crucial to connecting businesses with customers. This comes under the New Normal, wherein IT companies need to incorporate new cloud and mobile applications with legacy mainframe applications quickly and seamlessly, at the same time care for the quality and performance of the applications.

Kris Manery, senior vice president and general manager, Mainframe Solutions Business Unit, Compuware said, “Mainframe applications power the top retailers, banks, insurance companies, telecommunications and manufacturing companies worldwide. At the same time, as experienced developers retire, fewer developers are acquiring the mainframe skills needed to maintain these complex applications. This puts enterprises at significant risk for financial losses.”

"It's never been more important to have the tools and people in place to ensure mainframe applications deliver superior quality and performance."

Mainframe applications are becoming more customer-facing, complex and thus difficult to maintain. This puts companies at risk as they may face a skill shortage for maintaining costly and crucial applications.

In an independent research study on mainframe commissioned by Compuware and conducted by Vanson Bourne, a research-based content marketing firm, 71 percentof CIOs are concerned that the looming mainframe skills shortage will hurt their business, which will result in increased application risk (58 percent), reduced productivity (58 percent) and more project overruns (53 percent).

Tim Grieser, program vice president, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC (News - Alert), said, “Mainframe usage continues to increase with the addition of new customer-facing applications -- often connected to the Web and mobile devices -- plus growth in existing workloads. This growth is producing sizable increases in MIPS consumption and in deployed application complexity.”

“Compuware's modernized mainframe tools can help enterprises address their mainframe skills requirements needed to develop, maintain, extend and manage the performance of these increasingly business-critical applications,” Grieser said.