TechFieldDay Session Recap: BMC

I had the recent pleasure of attending the Tech Field Day event at the SHARE conference in Kansas City, expertly hosted by Stephen Foskett . Tech Field Day offers tech companies a ready-made focus group to discuss new innovations and product plans in front of a dedicated panel of experts – and is also live streamed on social media.

One of the highlights of the day was the session hosted by BMC Software, which concentrated on new developments in their AMI solution. Here’s a little of what I learned.

BMC AMI stands for “automated mainframe intelligence,” a suite of software solutions designed to support the mainframe management and help organizations make smarter, faster, and more confident business decisions.

The BMC team reinforced and illustrated their recently-unveiled statement of direction for the BMC AMI Platform, envisioned as the industry’s first mainframe co-pilot – the aim of which is straightforward, but compelling: to integrate all?BMC AMI products?while leveraging Gen AI capabilities to simplify mainframe transformation, enhance productivity, and accelerate innovation.

More broadly, BMC notes that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing traditional practices, including DevOps for the mainframe. The overarching goal of employing generative AI in mainframe DevOps is to enhance the application developer experience. Generative AI operates on the premise of explaining, guiding, and testing mainframe application changes and enhancements - generative AI takes a proactive stance in empowering developers throughout the software development lifecycle.

BMC is focusing in this area (in fairness, they aren’t alone – AI is an exciting new ingredient with many mainframe use-cases, as many will attest), leveraging GenAI to support capabilities such as

1.????? Understanding and then articulating what the code does

2.????? Reviewing organizational coding standards

3.????? Improving the delivery of changes

4.????? Offering real time coding suggestions through a Developer Personal Assistant

5.????? Supporting efficient testing (test case scripts and test data generation)

6.????? Rapidly identifying root causes of performance problems and downtime to reduce recovery times

This culminates in what they explained as mastering the fear of change – ensuring that mainframe application delivery can achieve its full potential. ?Facilities to support mainframe DevOps include the new visualization of structure and data flows in BMC AMI DevX Code Insights, while a Code Extract capability will remove dead or redundant code. BMC described their managed beta program for code explain functionality in?BMC AMI DevX Code Insights, which is the first example of the BMC AMI Assistant in action, and a great example of how BMC users will be able to experience the new Generative AI services as they are infused into existing solutions.?

BMC explained that AMI Assistant is the name for their full range of Generative AI capabilities that will be a part of the entire AMI Portfolio.

An additional facility, a Runtime Visualizer – illuminates the flow of control of application artifacts at execution time, further demystifying what a hitherto monolithic application is doing while in execution.

The BMC team then outlined a new facility known as AMI zAdviser – ostensibly a measurement and reporting facility (targeting a variety of roles including DevOps engineers, DBAs, SysProgs and Operations Management) - to help mainframe teams keep themselves honest in terms of key application delivery metrics, including quality, velocity, and efficiency.

The product offers a dashboard approach to provide a mission-control approach to how well teams are working on their code change backlog. A great example provided was the DORA 4 metrics facility – used by majority of clients using to measure DevOps success - which uses integrated data feeds from their other tools to collate and report on -

o?? Deployment frequency

o?? Lead time for change (commit to prod)

o?? Mean time to recovery (MTTR)

o?? Change Failure Rate (% of changes resulting in failure)

Having the means of proving and validating improvements in delivery efficiency helps with the agile principle of continuous improvement, they explained.

“Our goal is to help organizations preserve existing investments and institutional knowledge while modernizing and transforming the mainframe environment,”?said John McKenny, SVP & GM of Intelligent Z Solutions.??The BMC AMI Platform will help organizations achieve this by helping them utilize GenAI and Cloud Technologies to make mainframe systems intuitive and accessible for new talent. You’ve never mainframed like this!”

The ethos was clear from BMC: the mainframe is just another platform; AI and cloud will help lead its transformation such that delivery teams can aspire to be just as productive, innovative and productive as any other environment. Their quarterly release cycle ensures new capabilities will join the line up regularly and I’m looking forward to what unfolds.

For more information regarding TechFieldDay, visit their website.

[My thanks to Eric Odell for his support]