BMC Wants to Manage Many Mainframes

BMC Software is juicing up its management software for mainframe computers to make sure the big machines remain up and running.

BMC competes fiercely with IBM’s Tivoli business and
Computer Associates in what analysts claim is a multi-billion-dollar management software market. All three companies work to find placement for their products in the data centers and networks of large enterprises. All three are hanging their hats on automation as a key lure for customers.

The Houston-based maker of management software for businesses said Thursday it has enhanced its Mainview line by adding Internet Protocol (IP) “pacing” technology to make sure the most important applications, such as those for supply chain management (SCM) , have enough bandwidth available to render them.

Called Mainview for IP version 2.2, the software tool is accompanied by new versions of the Mainview line for CICS 5.7, or Energizer for CICS 4.4. Employed together and automated, Jonathan Adams, BMC’s director of Research and Development for Mainview, said the software will significantly reduce downtime and improve availability and service delivery.

Such software is important in a time when multi-billion-dollar business rely on electronic transactions over the Internet. Seconds of downtime can cost a company in the financial services sector millions of dollars. Customers have been requesting powerful and reliable products to secure the delivery of their data over TCP/IP networks

Many companies who rely on online transactions employ mainframes to house and process their data, which is why BMC makes its Mainview line to provide customers access to their IBM z/OS and OS/390 systems through one access point.

The product line, acquired when BMC bought Boole & Babbage in April 1999 for $900 million, runs the gamut of mainframe management, including optimization, application tuning, performance reporting and predictive planning.

Adams told internetnews.com Mainview for IP 2.2 also includes a new real-time tracing capability, enhanced File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
statistics and automation, and a real-time stack-monitoring facility.

Energizer for CICS support mainframes running CICS, a backbone that brings legacy applications to the Web in such sectors as online banking, Internet stock trading and so forth. Because CICS must support applications that enable the transaction of millions of dollars in business on any given day, 24-7 availability is vital.

Available now, Mainview for IP starts at $24,000; Mainview for CICS begins $33,000; and Energizer for CICS starts at $26,500.

In related news, Adams announced broader application support for its InTune mainframe application tuning tool, a piece of BMC’s Application Quality
Management portfolio that manages mainframe application tuning by targeting
and measuring performance. Adams said this saves millions per year by
helping customers fix bottlenecks before they affect services.

New InTune version 3.2 tends to application quality for batch SAP
applications on mainframe and supports application tuning in WebSphere MQ
middleware.