Published: November 15 2011, 12:43 PM | no comments
by Scott Fagen

So, I’m a couple of days into CA World ’11 and my feet hurt from being upright for double-digit hours every day, but it is heartening to see that our solid core of mainframe customers are here in force.  In fact, there are more mainframers here than the two previous CA Worlds!  The Exhibition Center is buzzing, especially around our new products, but there is also excitement around the new capabilities of the mainstays, as well. 

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve only been with CA for a little over four years now and that the work we’ve been doing has made such a positive impact on the mainframe world.  Last week, I received an email from one of my colleagues, Greg Shriver, who was part of the infancy of what became “Mainframe 2.0.”  In the email was a set of PowerPoint slides that contained digital photographs of what we were trying to do – change the way the mainframe is managed forever.  His words echoed my thoughts, “Wow, pretty amazing that this was less than 4 years ago…”

CA World ’11 is actually marking a transition for the mainframe business at CA.  When I joined in September of 2007, the company had just formed (or, better, reformed) the mainframe business, coalescing products that had been under separate management chains for many years.  While such an organization isn’t necessarily a “bad thing,” it was not reflective of what was going on in the market.  The IBM System z10 was just around the corner and customers were beginning to recommit to (or at least admit to the fact that they weren’t abandoning ) the platform. 

For us, Mainframe 2.0 was more than just a set of things to do, it was the metaphor for changing how we went about doing our business.  I will freely admit that much of what we did borrowed liberally from my IBM past, but many of the ideas were improved upon by my CA team of architects, developers, testers and even management.  Mainframe 2.0 became the rallying point for our setting high standards around the management of software.   It helped customers manage cost through identifying ways of getting greater value from the software the customer already has and expanding the use of specialty engines within our software.  Mainframe 2.0 is also the springboard for the advent of the next CA mainframe strategy.

Here at CA World ’11, we are kicking off the “Next Generation Mainframe Management” strategy, which builds upon the foundation laid by Mainframe 2.0.  None of the initiatives within Mainframe 2.0 are forgotten, they are now considered “business as usual.”  With “Next Generation Mainframe Management” we address the next set of challenges ahead:  the transitioning of the workforce from the experienced gurus who’ve been at this since the mainframe was the only game in town to a new cast of “ambidextrous” IT staffers who work “across the silos” instead of vertically within them.  Our new products and product releases are targeted at not only making this new workforce able to function this way, but to do so effectively. 

And, I’m not just talking about the silos within the mainframe discipline, we have been working on solving many of these issues across the datacenter, with products like Cross Enterprise APM (Wily and Sysview), Workload Automation (ESP, CA 7, and Autosys), we’ve only begun to break ground on some of the exciting new technologies that we are working on in the lab, like bringing our AppLogic technology to create a compute grid that not only encompasses Linux on System z, but allows for easy connectivity to z/OS transaction and database management.  With zEnterprse, we’ll be able to extend that grid to application serving on the blades in the zBX.

Yes, we’ve been working very hard the last four years, laying the foundation for some very exciting advances in the near future.  It’s exciting to see that the customers here at CA World really “get” what we are doing and how supportive they are of our efforts.  Of course, the reward for hard work is, as always, more hard work.