In a recent IT Business Edge blog, Mike Vizard wrote about the “The Long March Towards Mainframe and Distributed Computing Convergence.”  Vizard deftly points out that “the real economic issue facing most large IT organizations these days is that they can no longer afford to have separate staffs on hand to manage mainframe and distributed computing systems. As a result, interest level in managing mainframe and distributed computing systems under a common management console is rising.” In fact, recent surveys we’ve conducted and customer feedback both suggest this to be the case. At the same time, the evolution of data centers to include mainframe, distributed and cloud to deliver quality services to clients, has complicated cost-saving efforts.

Enter the Software Vendor
How can companies leverage increasing complex IT environments and still cut management costs?  It’s up to software vendors to provide them with the products and integration to make that happen. I’m proud to say that CA Technologies has taken on that challenge in a big way. At CA World last November, we announced our Next Generation Mainframe Management strategy, which not only supports the IBM z Enterprise platform, but is targeted at helping the mainframe to be used efficiently in conjunction with distributed systems, and in  both private and hybrid cloud environments.

Delivering on the Promise 
Our most recent case in point is what Vizard called, “aggressively positioning CA Technologies as the provider of a management framework that will make it easier for a single IT staff to manage both mainframe and distributed computing systems. In fact, we recently rolled out a new version of our Cross Enterprise Application Performance Management solution that is more tightly coupled with DB2 and IMS databases running on the z/OS mainframe and can consolidate this information about network traffic and data about the health of IT systems across mainframe, distributed and cloud ─ all presented in a single pane of glass.
 
Business Service Innovation + Cross-Enterprise APM = Greater IT Agility
This kind of business service innovation helps IT organizations move from simply managing and maintaining IT to being more agile in delivering quality business services to their customers. In the case of cross-enterprise application performance management, it offers IT organizations the ability to deploy shared management software to unify all the data center components to improve management and lower TCO. It allows them to perform “application” triage on the fly to solve problems quickly that could negatively impact business services.

There’s still a lot more to do in the “long march” toward simplifying management across today’s hybrid data centers.  At CA Technologies, we will continue to leverage our strong cross-platform product portfolio and focus on increasing agility through innovation and integration.  We will drive our next-generation mainframe management strategy that embraces the hybrid architecture from IBM as well as distributed and cloud computing environments.