how investing in your mainframe developers can accelerate
TRANSCRIPT
How investing in your mainframe developers can accelerate Digital Transformation
Brian Crane and Giulia Sermann
Micro Focus
November 2020
Session 2AU
For the enterprise, innovation requires the mainframe
Investment approaches…
Boost legacy skills and knowledge
Removal of old, unwanted technology
Modernise the IDEs – the advantages and challenges
Improve testing capabilities
The fastest way to get results from new technology is to build on what you have
Modernizing investments in core mainframe and other existing systems for DX and innovation is vital across applications, process strategies, and infrastructure
– IDC
In essence, bridging the old and the new
IDC InfoBrief, Modernization Strategies as a Foundation for Digital Transformation (DX), April 2020.
Market Data: The mainframe remains an important focus area … increasingly as part of a hybrid IT environment
90% 45%
Executives say the mainframe is a platform
for growth
Executives say that implementing cloud technologies is a priority
$97Bn
Hybrid Cloud market by 2023 (17% CAGR)
Sources: BMC Mainframe Survey 2020, Markets and Markets Cloud Data, 2020.
The challenge for the enterprise
Modernizing monoliths is hard to do.
Application Modernization starts with understanding where you are today.
Understand, then act.
“Before modernizing applications, it’s
vital to use advanced complexity analysis tools … Application leaders can justify the extra expense by also using these tools’ analysis to make applications more effective through
closer alignment with business goals.”
— Gartner, “Complexity Analysis Tools Are Worth Their Price for Application Modernization and Business Alignment,
Thomas Klinect, 23 July 2019
https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3953513/complexity-analysis-tools-are-worth-their-price-for-appl
Boost skills and knowledge Overcome a lack of expertise
Regain lost application knowledge, and reduce steepness of learning curve for new talent
Handle the impact of changeReduce risk when enhancing or merging capabilities in complex systems
Determine what to modernizeBetter documentation makes it easier to identify useful parts of the application
Unravel application complexityTheir sheer size and scale means it is hard to understand the value of core systems
Invest to:
• Deep application understanding to automate code simplification and impact analysis
• Supports new hire on-boarding and knowledge transfer
• Interactive interrogation of application composition
• Automatic mapping of code to “business rules” to capture complex business processes within an application
• Dozens of built in code searches including coding standards, application metrics, performance optimizations, portability assessment
Boost skills and knowledgeUnderstanding application complexity
“This enhanced application intelligence reduced our project risk substantially and ensured delivery success. We were so impressed with the insight Enterprise Analyzer gave us during this key stage of the project that we recommended to SBA that it become a core part of the future QA process.”Ken M’Bale, Chief Technology Officer, Select Computing
“The information provided can make or break a business. Within half an hour of installation I had a general synopsis of what I was dealing with and I could dive in very quickly without having complete business knowledge.”Eric Duchacek, Developer, David Kopf Instruments
“We recently re-hosted our relationship management application—one of the most critical ones—and Micro Focus enabled us to optimize the code, fix any inefficiencies and generally improve the migration phase in a really quick and easy way.”
Alejandro Nazarevich, Data Processing Manager, SMSV
Customer examples
Remove unwanted technology Increase supportability
Risks, upgrades, testing
Position for future flexibilityPlatform and architecture choice
Solve skills shortagesSpecialist technologies, non-mainstream
Contain costsDwindling user base, increasing costsUpgrade/currency considerations
Invest to:
Modernise✓Lower costs
✓Flexible deployment
✓Easier to manage/upgrade
✓Move to standard skillsets
✓Retain existing business functionality
✓Progression to DevOps
Removal of Unwanted Technology
Customer examples
Modernisethe IDEs Tackle limited toolchain integration
Disconnected processes and systems leading to silos
Remove testing and feedback delayTo enhance development capacity, reduce developer downtime
Overcome skills shortagesTrying to onboard or transfer specialty skills and resources to support existing application investments
Eliminate outdated development toolingCurrent infrastructure and resources limit yourdeveloper efficiency
Invest to:
• Industry Standard IDEs
• Compatibility with mainframe online and batch subsystems• Enterprise COBOL and PL/I Support
• CICS, IMS, JCL, VSAM etc.
• Faster coding using standard tooling –background parsing, better UI/UX, etc.
• Maximize developer efficiency by reducing mainframe resource conflict and wait time, and improving knowledge
Modernise the IDEsLook and feel
• Compile and test applications with zero impact on other users or developers
• Full mainframe test harness with graphical debugging always available
• Full Code Coverage and application profiling support
• Unit Test framework for generating and executing unit tests
Modernise the IDEsShifting testing left
• Zero IT or computer science background
• Had never written a line of code
• Had never heard of COBOL or mainframes
Modernise the IDEsWill onboarding new mainframe developers really be that easy?
• Able to write simple i/o COBOL programs and SQL in both most common IDEs
• Able to hold a conversation about common mainframe targeted technologies
• Ready to deliver my first presentation about it
• Extensive resources available online (Micro Focus COBOL Guide and IBM’s blog)
• Powerful but familiar toolset
• Help and support of my most experienced colleagues
• 5 months ago • Today • How?
Customer ExamplesBringing new IDEs to developers to support Digital Transformation
“It has enabled us to retain decades of valuable business intelligence, streamline our development practices, and respond faster to business requirements. We can also investigate moving to a more agile development model, fully supported by Visual COBOL.”
“We couldn’t believe how quickly everyone picked it up. Even our .NET developers were able to use Visual COBOL within a matter of days. Onboarding new development interns went from many months to just a few weeks.”
“We can now use COBOL code more flexibly as micro-services, integrated in a service-oriented architecture, to accelerate business processes.”
TODD BOYDSenior Software Architect
RUSSELL HOLLICKChief Software Architect
PETER PALMREUTHER Senior Java Developer German Pension Fund
Improve testing capabilities Improved Test Environments
More test regions and test data leads to better quality, faster
Overcome Capacity ConstraintsBuild on-demand test capabilities as part of CI/CD
Tackle Manual TestingAutomate as much as possible
Improve Toolchain IntegrationConnect with mainframe SCCM processes
Invest to:
Improve Testing CapabilitiesTesting challenges
Pressure to decrease the
time to market
Additional mainframe
infrastructure needed for
testing
Capacity bottlenecks
slow down the testing process
Insufficient testing early in SDLC leads to remediation cost increase
Production failures are
not an option
Improve Testing CapabilitiesTesting challenges
30X
15X
10X
5X
2X
Co
st
ProductionSystem testing
Integration/ component
testing
CodingRequirements
Remediating coding errors in production can cost up to 30x than during the business requirements design process. (NIST)
Improve Testing CapabilitiesWhat does the ideal testing environment look like
Time Efficiency
▪ Remove bottlenecks
▪ Improve productivity
▪ Improve integration
▪ Improve capacity
▪ Automate
Cost Efficiency
▪ Moderniseinfrastructure
▪ Improve quality of testing
▪ Reduce time to market
▪ Environment scalability
Low risk
▪ Improve quality of applications in production
▪ Improve testing environment
▪ Improve team efficiency
▪ Fast, repeatable provisioning of mainframe compatible test regions on servers or in the cloud
▪ Remove capacity and resource constraints on a scalable, low-cost test execution environment
▪ Scale up capacity on demand
Improve Testing CapabilitiesTest capacity on-demand
Customer examplesModernised testing platform
Reduced annual costs from $3 million to $120,000 per environment with test environments being provisioned in hours rather than weeks. Improved testing time by 50% which resulted in increased business agility by tripling the number of major releases per yearMAJOR Global Insurer
“Using the Micro Focus solutions has increased our confidence in the quality of our production releases and we are able to include more enhanced functionality in each release we issue.Pension provider
“The approach proposed by Micro Focus was 20 percent cheaper than the alternative option of expanding our mainframe capacity. Over three years, we expect to cut development and testing costs by 40 percent through heightened productivity and by exploiting efficiencies.”European Bank
SummaryDigital Transformation is a crucial path for any organization. Your developers are your key enablers – invest in them!
• Investments in COBOL & PL/I developers enable you to modernise:• Your mainframe applications to deliver more to the business, faster
• The application delivery process, with practices / tools for implementing DevOps and alleviating skills shortages
• Your application infrastructure, opening up new platform and architecture possibilities
“
Mar Hicks, technology historian and professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology
Q & A
“ In order to care for technological Infrastructure, we need maintenance engineers, not just systems designers—and that means paying for people, not just for products.
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