BMC partners to tackle modern mainframe challenges

BMC Software Inc. said its new mainframe offerings have opened opportunities for BMC partners to target organizations grappling with digital business demands.

The vendor launched its latest contribution to the mainframe market, Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI), last month. Billed as a "self-managing mainframe," AMI capabilities include domain expertise, machine learning, automation and predictive analytics capabilities, according to the vendor.

"We believe the mainframe has a very important future ahead of it to help our largest clients ... continue to run and operate their businesses effectively, and we intend to bring them solutions to help them do that," said John McKenny, vice president of ZSolutions at BMC, based in Houston.

McKenny said BMC developed the AMI product line to meet the demands of modern mainframe environment and digital business pressures.

"When you look at the [mainframe market], there is obviously tons of automation, but not in the way we think of in terms of modern analytics, modern machine learning and modern automation," he said.

Additionally, BMC recognized that mainframes offer customers different kinds of challenges compared with other areas of their IT environments, he said. He noted that the baby boomer workforce that has experience with mainframe technology is retiring, leaving a skills gap in its wake.

We believe the mainframe has a very important future ahead of it to help our largest clients ... continue to run and operate their businesses effectively.

He added that the loss of these skill sets is inspiring customers to "look at embracing more modern techniques and technologies to help them manage and run their environment more effectively than ever before."

"I think what we are seeing in what I would call the medium-size organizations, many of them are looking to [BMC partners] to operate more in a managed services way," he noted.

The demand for managed services is driven, in part, by customers not wanting to build certain skill sets internally to run and manage infrastructure. They would prefer to offload the technical work to BMC partners instead, he added.

McKenny said mainframe customers are also increasingly focused on bolstering security capabilities. Last month, BMC revealed a definitive agreement to purchase assets of CorreLog, a provider of security management software to mainframe customers. McKenny said it will combine its mainframe technology with CorreLog's security offerings to build a set of AMI products for security.

The CorreLog purchase will "bring to us a set of solutions that competes in that area of security information and event management, with a set of agents that can detect in real time a variety of different anomalies around potential threats" to mainframe security, he said.

BMC expects the CorreLog acquisition to close this quarter.