Well it’s official. The walls are beginning to come down between the mainframe and distributed IT teams.  The intense pressure on CIOs to reduce costs demand it.  The success of IBM’s zEnterprise facilitates it.  The rise of cloud computing compels it. Recent customer surveys confirm it.  Disparate IT teams are evolving into one, necessitating a convergence of responsibilities into an “ambidextrous”  workforce that works to deliver quality service across hardware platforms.   So, with the mainframe continuing to be critical to so many global businesses, what role will it play in this new IT frontier?

From Reliable Workhorse to the Heart of the Hybrid Data Center
Some of the main reasons so many companies rely on mainframes is that they can handle massive workloads, provide unmatched security and reliability and grow capacity as needed.  All of these needs are still critical, but now the business demands IT agility and innovation, at a lower risk and cost.  That’s why companies are looking at hybrid data centers and the cloud — to deliver business service innovations that help the enterprise move from simply managing and maintaining IT to delivering business services that ensure speed, agility, and innovation with cost/risk efficiencies.
Of course, many organizations still need the same attributes the mainframe uniquely offers to maximize that mission.   Enter the new role for the mainframe in evolving IT infrastructure.  It essentially needs to be mainstreamed as a key component in emerging IT strategies.

Call to Arms for Software Vendors
With the game changing rapidly, it’s up to management software vendors to rise to the occasion and innovate.  With IT silos disappearing, management software needs to help customers reduce costs, sustain critical skills and dramatically increase agility across the hybrid datacenter and the cloud.  This has to be woven into each company’s development strategy.  That’s why CA Technologies just announced our Next-Generation Mainframe Management Strategy.

Next-Generation Mainframe Management
Our strategy centers on the role of the mainframe as an integral part of Enterprise IT for the many global companies that rely on them today.  It focuses on increasing agility through innovation that embraces the next-generation architecture from IBM, enabling cloud computing on the mainframe, empowering the IT workforce that needs to manage across mainframe and distributed and extending management to support multi-vendor environments.