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Tag: compuware

  • Compuware Topaz Removes Go-To-Market Friction by Giving DevOps Fast, Efficient and Secure Access to Enterprise Data

    Advanced Data Visualization, Masking and Conversion Ensure Agile, Compliant Delivery of Apps and Analytics

    • Enterprises often find themselves unable to tap the full potential business value of their diverse data because DevOps teams can’t get all the data they need, when they need it, in the format they require.
    • Compuware Topaz for Enterprise Data takes labor, complexity and risk out of the data-to-value pipeline with powerful extraction, masking and visualization for the mainframe and other platforms.
    • With Topaz for Enterprise Data, enterprises can empower DevOps staff across skill/experience levels to more quickly, efficiently and securely leverage all available data sources to deliver high-value apps and analytics.

    DETROIT, June 28, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Compuware today released the new Topaz for Enterprise Data, which provides a powerful combination of data visualization, extract and load, and advanced data masking capabilities. With it, DevOps teams can more quickly, efficiently and securely access and leverage data from the mainframe and other platforms.

    Fast, streamlined access to high-value data has become an urgent concern as businesses seek competitive advantages in a digital economy, while fulfilling increasingly stringent compliance requirements. Topaz for Enterprise Data empowers developers, QA staff, operations teams and data scientists at all skill and experience levels to ensure they have immediate, secure access to the data they need, when they need it, in any format required.

    Data masking is a top concern, given the importance of protecting personally identifiable information (PII) and complying with regulatory mandates such as GDPR—even during development and testing, especially when outsourcing these functions.

    Topaz for Enterprise Data’s capabilities are particularly important for enterprises with large, diverse datasets of high business value residing on the mainframe that contain sensitive business or personal information. As senior mainframe professionals retire, large enterprises must transfer responsibility for stewardship of this data to a new generation of DevOps artisans with less hands-on mainframe experience.

    Topaz for Enterprise Data empowers these artisans to:

    • Readily understand relationships between data even when they lack direct familiarity with specific data types or applications, to ensure data integrity and resulting code quality.
    • Quickly generate data for testing, training or business analytics purposes that properly and accurately represents actual production data.
    • Ensure that any sensitive business or personal data extracted from production is properly masked for privacy and compliance purposes, while preserving essential data relationships and characteristics.
    • Convert file type as required.

    Topaz users can access all these capabilities from within a familiar Eclipse development environment.

    “Testing with production-like obfuscated data helps us develop and deliver better quality applications, as well as remain compliant with data privacy requirements,” said Lynn Farley, Manager of Data Management at TCF Bank. “Topaz provides our developers with a way to implement data privacy rules to obfuscate multiple data types across platforms and with consistent results.”

    “Leveraging a modern interface for fast, simple access to data for testing and other purposes is critical to digital agility,” said Rich Ptak of IT analyst firm Ptak Associates. “The latest version of Compuware Topaz for Enterprise Data delivers a benefits trifecta to resolve the long-standing challenge of rapidly getting value from the reams of data from disparate sources and formats that are critical to DevOps and continuous improvement.”

    Today’s announcement marks the 15th consecutive quarter that Compuware has delivered essential innovation to help large enterprises master Agile and DevOps tasks on a mainstreamed mainframe, so they can best leverage the platform’s unmatched performance, scalability, reliability, efficiency and security.

    “The wealth of data that should give large enterprises a major competitive advantage in the digital economy often instead becomes a hindrance due to the complexity of sourcing across platforms, databases and formats,” said Chris O’Malley, CEO of Compuware. “With Topaz for Enterprise Data, Compuware is removing these hindrances—so there’s far less friction between enterprise data and business wins.”

    Compuware Corporation
    Compuware empowers the world’s largest companies to excel in the digital economy by fully leveraging their high-value mainframe investments. We do this by delivering highly innovative solutions that uniquely enable IT professionals with mainstream skills to manage mainframe applications, data, and platform operations. Learn more at compuware.com.

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    Press Contact
    Frank Cioffi, The Medialink Group, frankc@medialinkgroup.com, (415) 893-1570
    Kristina LeBlanc, The Medialink Group, kristinawleblanc@gmail.com, (508) 930-5636
    Mary McCarthy, Public Relations Manager, Compuware, mary.mccarthy@compuware.com, (313) 227-7088

    For Sales and Marketing Information
    Compuware Corporation, One Campus Martius, Detroit MI 48226, 800-266-7892, www.compuware.com.

    Copyright © 2018, Compuware Corporation. All rights reserved. The Compuware products and services listed within this release are trademarks or registered trademarks of Compuware Corporation.

  • Compuware Survey Connects Mainframes, DevOps

    Compuware Survey Connects Mainframes, DevOps

    Mainframes are still necessary; integrating them with modern hardware and software is tricky; and DevOps is the answer. Those are the takeaways from a survey out this week that was commissioned by Compuware.

    The survey, which was released Dec. 14, was conducted by Forrester. It asked professionals how often their organizations rely on mainframe systems and what they do to overcome the challenges associated with using legacy mainframes within modern computing environments.

    The survey suggests that mainframes are not going anywhere soon: 57 percent of respondents said new business initiatives “always” involve the mainframe, according to Compuware. Even though mainframe systems are now decades old, they still have a place in modern IT.

    But bridging the gap between mainframes and more modern infrastructure and software delivery practices is tough, according to the survey. This is due not only to what Compuware calls “organizational bureaucracy” and “insufficient funding,” but also the difficulty of integrating mainframes with other types of technology that were designed in a different era.

    The survey shows that most professionals take one of three approaches to solving that challenge:

    • Move applications off of mainframes. The downside to this strategy is that mainframe applications may not run as fast or as securely on other hardware.
    • Avoid using the mainframe at all. This, too, is not always ideal, according to Compuware, because the mainframe is better at handling some types of workloads.
    • “Modernize” mainframes, which entails a lot of investment and effort.

    According to Forrester’s conclusion in the study, a better approach is to apply DevOps techniques to mainframe development. That means that the mainframe technology itself does not have to change or be hybridized; only the approach to mainframe app delivery changes. “Those companies embracing DevOps deliver faster and at a higher quality, all while fostering collaboration,” Forrester concluded.

    These are all things that a Compuware-sponsored study is likely to say, of course. Compuware specializes in DevOps solutions for the mainframe.

    Still, the survey is a good reminder that mainframe is alive and well—and DevOps teams should not leave it out of the picture.

    — Chris Tozzi

  • Compuware Buy Aims to Enable DevOps on Mainframes

    Compuware Buy Aims to Enable DevOps on Mainframes

    How do you bring DevOps to mainframes? Eliminate the need for developers and admins to have mainframe expertise. That’s the strategy mainframe specialist Compuware is following as it seeks to break into the DevOps market.

    On Dec. 6, Compuware announced its acquisition of Standardware Inc., adding Standardware’s COPE IMS virtualization software to Compuware’s portfolio.

    That’s important because the IMS virtualization product helps to speed the development of database and transaction-management software that is used widely on mainframes in industries such as banking and commercial aviation. It does so by allowing developers to create virtual mainframe development environments, instead of relying on actual hardware—which is more costly and more difficult to provision.

    “The result is greater digital agility across all tiers of the enterprise architecture, from front-end systems of engagement to back-end systems of record,” according to Compuware.

    Bridging the DevOps-Mainframe Divide

    But Compuware’s acquistion of Standardware is not just about bringing a new virtualization technology to mainframe developers. The ultimate goal is to make it easier for software engineers who don’t have backgrounds in mainframe systems to write code that can run on them.

    “Successful transition of mainframe stewardship from retiring Baby Boomer specialists to less specifically mainframe-experienced Millennials” will be key to enabling agile, DevOps-based application development and deployment techniques for the mainframe, according to Compuware.

    For the declining number of software engineers out there who are mainframe experts, the push to remove special knowledge requirements from the mainframe development scene will not bode well. For the DevOps world as a whole, however, Compuware’s strategy for keeping mainframes relevant in the DevOps sounds a lot like the “serverless” computing movement. The goal of serverless computing is to allow developers to write code without having to think about the hardware it will be deployed on.

    Making mainframes totally serverless probably is not a realistic goal. Mainframe development languages and frameworks are so different from those of commodity hardware that mainframe software will never be quite the same as code written for other servers. Still, software such as IMS virtualization can help to make mainframes feel less like mainframes for the developers working with them—and that will be essential for making sure that mainframes are not left out of the DevOps revolution.

    — Chris Tozzi

  • Episode 2 of devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast

    Episode 2 of devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast

    Mitchell Ashley and I are joined this week by Stephen Wilson of Compuware. Stephen is a regular blogger here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, but is also the technical evangelist at Compuware.  Steve gives us his background and a brief description of what Compuware does.  Then we all talk a bit about Steve’s last article here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud,  Don’t worry testing team, DevOps is here!. While some say that testing is a big loser in DevOps and many testing/QA teams feel a threat to their job security, Stephen says not true.  In fact DevOps makes the testing team superstars. Tes.com ting teams should embrace DevOps as it will make their job easier and more powerful, but not less important.  Steve talks about the concept of “continuous testing”.  All of this in just about 13 minutes.

    Enjoy!

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    Also if you would like to be a guest on a future devopsy.kinsta.cloud podcast write us at podcast@devops.com