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Tag: Rocket Software

  • Survey Surfaces Raft of Enterprise IT Challenges

    Survey Surfaces Raft of Enterprise IT Challenges

    A survey of  enterprise IT leaders found less than a third (32%) are extremely confident that they have the right technology, processes and people in place to execute an effective approach to IT management.

    The survey, conducted by Rocket Software, polled 275 U.S. IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. A full 93% of IT leaders are also committed to maximize the value of investments in existing platforms.

    As a result, the top priorities for IT leaders are hybrid cloud computing (65%), data and content management (68%) followed by DevOps and infrastructure and application modernization, tied at 58%, and automation (57%).

    A total of 62% noted they have a much greater focus on efficiency due to the economic landscape, with faster DevOps processes, automated processes and increasing overall output as the top three improvements that would be most impactful for increasing efficiency.

    The survey also suggested many organizations still have much work to do to achieve those goals, with 63% of respondents spending anywhere from six to 15 hours on manual data entry and analysis each week.

    Phil Buckellew, president of infrastructure modernization for Rocket Software, said most organizations are still trying to determine the right level of DevOps to adopt. Few organizations have implemented DevOps workflows on an end-to-end basis, with many employing a mix of DevOps and waterfall processes to build and deploy applications across a hybrid cloud computing environment, he noted.

    Overall, IT leaders are most worried about improving overall IT performance (60%), data security (50%), process risk and compliance (46%) and the need to improve agility (41%), the survey found. Respondents also noted that they measure success within their IT organization by increased efficiency (71%), optimized resources (67%) and reduced risk (63%).

    The survey makes it clear that, despite challenges, enterprise IT organizations are committed to hybrid cloud computing as they become more comfortable with using various platforms that are fit for purpose, said Buckellew.

    Mainframes, for example, continue to play a major role in running online transaction processing (OLTP) applications alongside analytics applications that are now being infused with artificial intelligence (AI) capabililities, noted Buckellew.

    A quarter of survey respondents also identified providing cloud applications with access to mainframe data as an area where they need additional tools, followed by automation (22%).

    The biggest automation obstacles are the complexity of implementing automation (18%), resistance to process change among workforce (18%) and lack of skillsets to implement automation (18%), the survey finds.

    As always, the biggest challenge in enterprise IT environments is often simple inertia. Organizations that have been building and deploying applications on mainframes, for example, have been relying on waterfall processes for decades. Many of them have now adopted DevOps processes to varying degrees, but few have completely replaced legacy approaches to building and deploying software, noted Buckellew.

    It’s not likely the management of complex hybrid cloud computing environments will be simplified any time soon, but progress continues to be made. Soon, AI may automate many existing manual tasks. In the meantime, however, the number of enterprise IT organizations standardizing on a single IT platform remains few and far between.

  • Rocket Software Extends DevOps Reach to IBM I Platforms

    Rocket Software Extends DevOps Reach to IBM I Platforms

    Rocket Software has added support for the IBM I platform as part of its relaunch of a DevOps platform that also runs on IBM mainframes.

    Chris Wey, president of the data modernization business unit at Rocket Software, said the Rocket DevOps continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform will make it possible for organizations that employ both IBM I midrange platforms and mainframes to modernize application development and deployment using a common framework.

    Modernization of application development on mainframes has been occurring for some time. A survey of more than 500 U.S. IT professionals conducted by Rocket Software found 44% of respondents employ multiple DevOps tools, but slightly less than a quarter (24%) have a comprehensive DevOps platform in place.

    Rocket Software is expanding its DevOps reach to include the IBM I platform because organizations that rely on this platform have the same pressing need as other organizations to more quickly build applications, said Wey.

    It’s not clear to what degree organizations are still building new applications for what have become venerable IBM platforms. A Rocket Software survey found that while 82% of respondents are migrating workloads to the cloud, only 4% reported they are migrating completely to the cloud. The bulk of most mission-critical applications running on mainframes are online transaction processing (OLTP) applications that require a level of processing capability that still can’t be easily matched using any other platform. There are plenty of instances where certain classes of workloads have been migrated off the mainframe to run on lower-cost platforms. However, there are still many enterprise applications that continue to run faster on mainframes than they could on any other platform.

    In most cases, Wey noted, organizations will be deploying and updating applications across hybrid cloud computing environments for years to come. The immediate challenge they face is a lack of DevOps skills among the IT teams that manage IBM I systems and mainframes, he added.

    Rocket Software also provides access to a set of application development tools for building modern applications on IBM platforms. Most recently, the company added support for an open source Python software development (SDK) that IBM created for the Python programming language to the Rocket Open AppDev for Z framework for building mainframe applications.

    The overarching goal is to make IBM platforms more accessible to a wider range of application developers and DevOps professionals that today mainly work on distributed computing platforms, noted Wey.

    One way or another, the divide that has existed between legacy platforms and distributed computing systems is continuing to narrow. Many organizations are trying to lower the total cost of IT by centralizing management of both these classes of systems versus continuing to hire and retain separate IT teams.

    The IBM I platform traces its lineage back to AS/400 systems that were first launched in 1988 as an integrated midrange minicomputer rival to VAX/VMS systems from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Fast-forward more than 30 years later and there still are many IBM I platforms running long after VAX/VMS systems have all but disappeared.

  • Leveraging the Open-Source Ecosystem When Developing Modern z/OS Applications

    Leveraging the Open-Source Ecosystem When Developing Modern z/OS Applications

    Developers today are under great pressure to create apps faster than ever before, and they must continuously update them, adding new features and incorporating new technologies. Many companies have adopted DevOps, cloud-native architectures, and low-code development solutions to accelerate the development and updating cycle. But another critical aspect to modern application development has been to take advantage of the numerous benefits of using open-source software.

    The advantages of open-source software include fast cycles (compared to many commercial applications) for new versions, more responsiveness to add user-requested features, frequent updates to accommodate new technologies, and a large developer base that brings varied and diverse approaches to solving problems. Then there are the business benefits. Open-source software is often lower cost, more flexible (less chance of vendor lock-in), and more transparent than commercial offerings. Additionally, open-source software perfectly complements today’s cloud-native applications that bring loosely coupled components together as an alternative to the monolithic applications of old.

    Such benefits have driven up the use of open-source software in enterprises, particularly over the last several years. A number of past studies highlighted the wide-scale and growing use of open-source software. One study found that essentially all (99 percent) of the codebases examined contained at least one open-source component, with open source comprising 70 percent of the code overall. And in another survey released last year, 75 percent of enterprises said open-source software was very or extremely important. And 77 percent of companies in the same survey said they planned to ramp up their use of open software over the next 12 months.

    Open source and z/OS

    The enthusiasm for open-source software extends into the z/OS application development community for all the same reasons as with general apps. Namely, there is a vast ecosystem of solutions and developers that a company can rely on when developing modern z/OS applications.

    In particular, there are a number of z/OS open-source software groups, projects, and efforts to draw from.

    To start, there are open-source programming languages and tools like Python, Git, and cURL available that let developers use the power of z/OS systems without learning new skills.

    There are groups like the Open Mainframe Project, which aims to be a focal point for deploying and using Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment.

    One project from this group is Zowe, which is an open-source framework for the modern z/OS system. Zowe bridges the divide between modern applications and the mainframe, providing easier interoperability and scalability among products and solutions from multiple vendors.

    And there are open-source projects like Ansible, an open-source community project for app deployment, configuration management, and orchestration. It is available for z/OS. Ansible allows developers to automate z/OS applications. With Ansible, developers can use existing JCL, REXX, and z/OSMF to automate z/OS-based software. This lets a developer take a common approach to hybrid applications and lets them integrate z/OS into an enterprise automation strategy in a consistent way.

    A great advantage of using these open-source z/OS offerings is that developers with widely available skills can create new z/OS apps. That is a major plus these days as the pool of talent that has native z/OS skills is diminishing. Many of the people that came up on mainframes and coding for z/OS are retiring. And many younger developers are learning on the job to program for z/OS.

    Enterprise capabilities are still a must

    As with many open-source solutions ranging from Linux to Apache webserver to Kubernetes, companies that use them must complement the solutions with additional capabilities to ensure availability, security, and performance.

    A do-it-yourself (DIY) approach is certainly possible. But that requires a great amount of time and resources. It also requires skills that a company may not have. Hiring for those skills or getting internal staff trained in these areas also is costly and time-consuming.

    The alternative is to partner with a technology provider that brings z/OS expertise, a knowledge of open-source, and the features and people to make the solutions enterprise-ready.

  • Rocket Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS Forum

    Rocket Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS Forum

    Join the Rocket Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS forum. A place where you can ask questions about our open source languages and tools and get answers from other mainframe professionals like yourself, as well as members of the Rocket team.

    As a Forum member you can engage your peers, learn how they’re using Rocket Open Source Languages, and share your experiences. You can crowdsource solutions and you’ll also get access to exclusive information and experiences, including invitations to work directly with product teams on future releases and enhancements.

    • Access general installation and use postings
    • Leverage experience of other users
    • Post your own questions

    Join the Forum NOW.

  • The Move Away from Monolithic Application Development

    The Move Away from Monolithic Application Development

    Shifting from monolithic application development

    Businesses need agility to deliver better services, meet changing requirements, and seize new opportunities as they arise. At the heart of many efforts are applications based on modern development strategies and techniques. Specifically, many businesses are moving away from monolithic applications of the past that are hard to modify and take a long time to bring to market.

    Why the shift and why now? Over 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on customer experience (CX). As a result, businesses in the most competitive markets like retail, banking, insurance, financial services, and travel/hospitality cannot afford to wait months or years to release new services, applications, or features.

    The bottom line is that software development teams are under pressure to deliver more of everything (new applications, enhanced features, more access options) in shorter time frames. A widely cited past industry study put the issues into perspective. Leading companies routinely perform multiple deployments daily. By comparison, low performers reported deploying only once a month at best. (At the extreme end of the spectrum, companies like Amazon and Google do deployments thousands of times a day.)

    Monolithic application development does not work in this fast-paced environment. A simple change in an existing application, such as incorporating a new dataset, adding new features in a front-end app, or using a different analytics method, requires that the entire application be revised, retested, and redeployed. That all takes time. Lots of time.

    A better approach is to use modern applications development methodologies. In particular, there is a shift underway to using cloud-native architectures based on loosely connected microservices and elements.

    A cloud-native approach is particularly well-suited for modern applications for several reasons. For example, a cloud-native approach helps organizations address the customer experience drivers that require constant updates and new services. Each component of a cloud-native application can be deployed and maintained as a self-contained microservice. If any element of a broad application needs to be updated or changed, only that element needs to be touched. The rest of the conglomerate application remains the same.

    z/OS plays well with cloud-native

    Many industries under the greatest pressure to speed development and deliver ever-more customized, personalized customer experiences use z/OS systems. As noted, these are retail, banking, insurance, financial services, and travel/hospitality. Government also can be added to the list. It is a large user of z/OS systems and is constantly trying to improve access to its services via new or improved web, mobile, chat, social, and phone applications.

    There are two ways to enhance and develop applications for these systems that use modern development methods. One is to make data, applications, and services that run on z/OS systems available as APIs and as microservices to be used by larger cloud-native applications.

    The other method that is gaining more favor is to provide the modern development tools for the z/OS systems themselves. Specifically, modern application development approaches that move away from monolithic architectures need certain essential elements. Many rely on open-source development techniques, workflow automation, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools.

    Bringing such commonly used tools to the z/OS environment helps businesses speed the development of new applications to meet changing demands of their customers. It allows a business to leverage the data and applications on its z/OS systems and create innovative new applications.

    In an age when it is getting harder to find developers with expertise in native z/OS programming, bringing familiar DevOps tools to the z/OS environment offers several benefits. Those who have the native z/OS skills can focus on core applications and leave the tasks like supporting a new front end or enhancing a web interface to others. After all, there are many more developers available with modern development skills.

    Bringing the DevOps tools into the z/OS environment also lets businesses retain all the pluses of those systems. Namely, businesses are assured that the same reliability, superior performance, tightly controlled security, and massive scalability are retained and can be leveraged with integrated with a broader cloud-native application.

     

     

  • Integrating z/OS Systems for Cross-channel Experiences

    Integrating z/OS Systems for Cross-channel Experiences

    Integrating z/OS Systems to Enable a Seamless Cross-channel Customer Experience

    Many industries where customer experience is the critical differentiator run on z/OS systems. That includes retail, financial services, transportation, hospitality, government, and more. As a result, integration of z/OS systems into any customer-oriented application or with front-end applications is essential.

    Just how important is the issue? More than two-thirds of companies now primarily compete based on customer experience.  That’s up from 36% ten years ago. Companies like Jet Blue and The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company have historically been known for their exceptional customer service. And eyewear provider Warby Parker, widely appreciated for its customer experience, is known for a legendary example of above and beyond service when an executive returned a pair of glasses to the home of a customer who had left the glasses on an Acela train ride.

    Beyond multi-channel to omni-channel

    Many businesses offer multiple ways for customers to interact with their company. It is not unusual for a company to support interactions via the web, in-person, mobile, voice, text, and chat. That way, every customer can use their preferred method to ask questions, review account information, check on an order status, get information, search, place orders, and more.

    What differentiates one company from another is when a business offers a seamless cross-channel customer experience. Often called omni-channel, a seamless cross-channel experience is a multi-channel approach to serving customers that offers an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out.

    We’ve all experienced the siloed approach that treats each channel separately. You’re doing something online such as placing an order, checking the status of a service request, or inquiring about your account. An issue occurs such as a phone line dropping, your mobile phone’s screen is too small to carry out the task, or you simply want to talk to someone in person. You switch from mobile to Web, or phone to in-store, and there is no connection or carryover between what you have already done and now. You need to reenter information, answer the same questions, and walk through the same steps.

    In contrast, the interaction with a business that delivers a seamless cross-channel experience is much different. An agent on the phone knows you’ve had trouble placing an order online, the in-store representative is expecting you to drop off an item for repair, and when you log into your account online, you are taken to the part of the process you were at on your mobile device.

    Integration is the key

    Omni-channel customer experience seamlessly integrates the different communication channels that businesses use to communicate with customers. Customer demand for a seamless cross-channel experience is pushing businesses to change. The number of companies investing in an omni-channel customer experience has jumped from 20% in 2010 to more than 80% in 2020.

    As a result, z/OS users are racing to adapt to the new realities of the omni-channel customer experience. Users expect that data and applications will be as readily available on mobile devices, the web, or via phones as they are on desktop clients.

    Developing a seamless cross-channel user experience can mean a significant amount of new application coding. What’s needed is a way to easily transform proven applications and system-of-record data using modern APIs to accelerate the delivery of new services and meet changing customer expectations.

    To tightly integrate z/OS systems for such efforts requires the embracement of modern application development methodologies. That includes providing developers with solutions that let them retain the decades of efforts that went into the core applications running on their z/OS systems while building new applications that tap into these systems.

    Businesses must make available to their developers the commonly used open-source development, workflow automation, and CI/CD tools to the z/OS environment to accomplish this. Such a strategy will help businesses speed the development of new applications to meet changing demands of their customers. It allows a business to leverage the data and applications on its z/OS systems and create innovative new applications.

    Developing new customer applications while retaining the core business functions, processes, and data on the z/OS systems ensures that all front-end access makes use of a single source of truth about the customer. There is only one record associated with each customer. Such integration of z/OS systems thus makes it much easier to keep all the channels aligned and lets businesses deliver the prized and highly desired seamless cross-channel customer experience.

  • Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS

    Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS

    Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS

    Empower your developers to use their preferred open source languages. We offer many open source languages and tools—including Git, R and Python—that allow any developer to harness the power of the mainframe without having to spend months learning new skills.

     

    Git

    Git is a version control system (VCS) for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people. It is primarily used for software development, but it can be used to keep track of changes in any files. The z/OS port of git supports automatic tagging and conversion of text files between ISO8859-1 (ASCII) and IBM-1047 (EBCDIC) character encodings.

     

    Bash

    Bash is an sh-compatible shell providing users a command-line interpreter that provides a traditional interface via text window and a script execution capability. It is the default shell on Linux and Mac OS X.

     

    Bison

    Bison is a programming utility for creating parsers. It’s commonly used in both build automation and build automation generation, and converts annotated context-free grammar into a C, C++, or Java parser. Bison is used by PHP, Bash, Ruby, and many other tools.

     

    bzip2

    bzip2 is a data compressor that compresses single files (it is not a file archiver). It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best available techniques of statistical compressors, while being around twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression. This version of bzip2 was not written to exploit z Systems architecture; gzip may work best for these needs.

     

    cURL

    cURL is an open source tool that can transfer data to and from servers by using one of the supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, TFTP, DICT, TELNET, LDAP, or FILE). This tool can work without user interaction. cURL functionality includes proxy support, user authentication, FTP upload, HTTP post, SSL connections, cookies, file transfer, resume, and more.

     

    Diffutils

    Diffutils is a package of several programs intended to find differences between files. The diff command, for example, shows exact line differences between two files.

     

    Gzip

    Gzip is a popular data compression/decompression program (our ported tools have been compressed using this utility). This version of Gzip has also been modified to exploit z/OS EDC compression hardware, if present on your system.

     

    libssh2

    libssh2 is a software library that allows developers to use the SSH-2 network protocol in an easy-to-use self-contained package. This package only contains LIBSSH2 libraries intended for use by other programs or utilities.

     

    m4

    M4 is a general-purpose macro processor. Most users require M4 simply as a dependency of Autoconf or Bison, although the language is used in other contexts such as text template re-use, text editing and text-processing applications.

     

    Make

    Make controls the generation of program executables and other non-source files from the program’s source files. Make allows users to build, install and update packages without knowing the process details.

     

    Mktemp

    The mktemp utility takes a given filename template and overwrites a portion of it to create a unique filename. Mktemp also manages the creation of temporary files and directories that allow the user to avoid the cleaning up files that are not needed permanently.

     

    OpenSSL

    OpenSSL is a software library to be used in applications that need to secure communications against eavesdropping or need to ascertain the identity of the party at the other end.

     

    Pkg-Config

    pkg-Config is a programming tool that assists with compiling applications and libraries. It helps you insert the correct compiler options on the command line without the need of hard coding values on where to find glib (or other libraries).

     

    Sed

    sed (stream editor) is a utility for parsing and transforming text. It is typically used for extracting part of a file using pattern matching, or substituting multiple occurrences of a string within a file.

     

    sudo

    sudo is a command-line utility that allows admins to delegate authority, giving certain users the ability to run commands as a super-user or another user, while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments.

     

    Unzip

    UnZip is an extraction utility for archives compressed in .zip format. Unzip is also compatible with PKZIP and PKUNZIP utilities for MS-DOS as well as Info-ZIP’s and supports bzip2 compression methods as well.

     

    Vim

    Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient.

     

    Zip

    Zip is a compression and file packaging/archive utility. Zip puts one or more compressed files into a single ZIP archive, along with information about the files.

     

    zlib

    zlib is a general-purpose, lossless data compression library providing in-memory compression and decompression functions, including integrity checks of the uncompressed data.

     

    Download Now   Please link to https://www.rocketsoftware.com/zos-open-source/tools

    Read more about Rocket Support for Open Source Tools   Please link to: https://www.rocketsoftware.com/contact-open-source-tools-zos

    Join the FREE Rocket Open Source Tools Forum Please link to: https://community.rocketsoftware.com/forums/forum-home?CommunityKey=1e694975-142d-4f2d-9b52-0e37e225db41?utag_campaign=ADM&utag_channel=3P&utag_platform=CS&utag_content=OpenAppDevdevopsy.kinsta.cloudmicrosite&utag_location=WW&utag_name=ADM_3P_CS_OpenAppDevdevopsy.kinsta.cloudmicrosite_2020-01_WW

  • Languages and DevOps: Mainframe

    Languages and DevOps: Mainframe

    In true DevOps fashion, I nearly forgot to cover the mainframe after saying it warranted its own blog!

    There is a lot going on right now in the mainframe space, so the question of mainframe language choices has several different answers. We’ve got Linux running on the mainframe, we’ve got cross-compiled open source capable of running on the mainframe natively, we’ve got mainframe-based containers and we even have traditional mainframe tools being ported to other platforms (hello, COBOL on Linux!) so that development can happen on smaller platforms but target the mainframe.

    Taken in the order they came available, we have traditional mainframe development, in languages like COBOL and RPG, right on the mainframe in standard LPARs. This has gotten easier over the years, but is still basically the same development environment that was used in the 1980s, with prettier UIs.

    Then we have Linux LPARs available that allow for development right on the mainframe. There are issues and differences from other Linux development environments, but not as many as you’d think. This approach gives a broad selection of development tools on a Linux platform, making it an appealing choice.

    Next came containers, which can then run Linux in a container with the container offering the interfaces that Linux expects to find. This approach has the benefit of being more like development on other Linux platforms, but interaction with core services can still be platform-specific at times. This approach offers the breadth of open-source languages that came naturally with containers plus the few that have been ported over to z/OS.

    Then came speed porting. The biggest weakness of the above options was that it took too long for vulnerabilities to be addressed and new functionality to be moved over to the mainframe. The fact is that porting a language took time, and wasn’t as rapid as the response for the core Linux kernel. There has been a movement to improve the dev tools that create the ports, and now response time to CVEs or improvements in the kernel is much better. A side effect of this movement has been increased availability of languages and tools that are used by DevOps to get things done.

    Finally, we have recently received support for traditional languages on other Linux platforms. Most notably, given the number of lines of code out there, COBOL is now officially supported on Linux, meaning you can develop on the desktop without a ton of overhead, and then deploy to the mainframe. This has the effect of enabling DevOps processes and mentality for more traditional languages. This is still new, and the differences between developing on one platform and deploying on another will have to be worked out, but it is a step in the right direction.

    So what should you use?

    Mainframes are generally a more controlled environment than most DevOps teams are used to. The work required to support and update a given language, keeping it and its libraries up-to-date is more complex than just a generic Linux system, and that gives rise to very focused shops in the mainframe space. Generally speaking, you will be told what to use, or more to the point, which languages are supported. If you get input into the process, recommend Python, as it has the biggest pool of developers and libraries out there at the moment. But chances are, the mainframe team already has a language in place that they want DevOps teams to focus on, and in that case, use what’s available.

    No matter which language you end up using, API-wrapping mainframe functionality is a time honored tradition at this point, make the mainframe do the heavy lifting and return just what your application needs. Think of it as a big, smart database that can pre-process results for you at high speed, in high volumes.

    And keep rolling.

    Mainframes have been around forever. They’ve been pronounced dead dozens of times, and yet the security, stability and locality of a mainframe keeps them in the mix. Data gravity helps too – the data is there, the routines to do processing on the data are there, handing that data off to another platform for presentation isn’t that big a deal, and the mainframe just keeps ticking along. Because (at this point) generations of developers have made it tick. Keep that tradition alive if you’re in a mainframe shop; they are literally the core of systems in the places they are in heavy use.

  • Rocket Software Extends Its Technology and Global Reach with Agreement to Acquire ASG Technologies

    WALTHAM, Mass. – April 12, 2021

    News summary

    • Rocket® announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ASG Technologies
    • Acquisition furthers Rocket’s commitment to its customers and partners to continue to grow its portfolio of enterprise software solutions
    • The combination of portfolios will drive a more holistic approach to generating value

    Full story

    Rocket Software (“Rocket®”), a global technology leader that develops enterprise modernization and optimization solutions for Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ASG Technologies (“ASG”), a leading provider of solutions for the information-powered enterprise.

    This acquisition furthers Rocket’s commitment to its customers and partners to continue to grow its portfolio of enterprise software solutions that increase the value of legacy platforms across the technology domains of core infrastructure, security, data & AI, application development, open source, and hybrid cloud.

    “We know ASG well and are pleased to add their competencies and expertise in and around structured and unstructured data, content management, and systems management to our combined company,” said Andy Youniss, CEO, Rocket Software. “This is an important milestone in our journey of investing in global enterprise IT solutions and in our ongoing commitment to our customers. We will continue to enable our customers to evolve their core applications, take advantage of the power of their data, and operate their IT environments.”

    The combination of these portfolios will drive a more holistic approach to generating value from the vast data capabilities of extensive applications at the core of their business. Decades of innovation in the content management space from ASG will continue under Rocket leadership to address the shifting challenges of integration and transparency across legacy, cloud, and SaaS environments. The systems management solutions will continue to support the efficient operation of these critical environments.

    “Digital transformation has taken on a new level of priority for organizations across industries and geographies in the past year, and the urgency with which it has been embraced in the enterprise has further solidified ASG’s mission to improve the way people, information processes and systems work together to deliver business outcomes,” said Charles Sansbury, President and CEO, ASG. “With our combined expertise and shared vision, together Rocket and ASG will bring industry-leading innovation to our customer base worldwide.”

    The deal is expected to close later this calendar quarter, subject to receipt of applicable regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed at this time.

    Bank of America Securities and Barclays are acting as joint financial advisors to ASG. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP is acting as legal counsel to ASG.

    About Rocket Software

    Rocket Software empowers organizations to create legendary impact in the world through innovation in legacy technologies. With deep expertise in IBM Z, IBM Power, and database and connectivity solutions, Rocket provides solutions that power tens of thousands of global businesses, solving real problems and making real-world impact. Rocket is a privately held U.S. corporation headquartered in the Boston area with centers of excellence strategically located throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Rocket is a portfolio company of Bain Capital Private Equity.

    Legacy Powers Legendary™

    About ASG Technologies

    ASG Technologies is an award-winning, industry-recognized, and analyst-verified global software company providing the only integrated platform and flexible end-to-end solution for the information-powered enterprise. ASG’s Information Management solutions capture, manage, govern, and enable companies to understand and support all types of information assets (structured and unstructured) and stay compliant. ASG’s IT Systems Management solutions ensure that the systems and infrastructure supporting that information lifecycle are always available and performing as expected. ASG has over 3,500 customers worldwide in top vertical markets including Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance and Government. Visit ASG on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. ASG is a portfolio company of Evergreen Coast Capital, Elliott Investment Management’s technology-focused Menlo Park affiliate.

     

    Cautionary Information Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

    This release contains “forward-looking statements.” Forward-looking statements represent management’s current expectations and are based upon information available to the Company at the time of this release. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond the Company’s control, that may cause the actual results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise forward looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.