IBM and CA Technologies team up to help give mainframe a cloudy edge

They are two companies who have spent more time espousing the benefits of the mainframe than most – and now IBM and CA Technologies have forged a new partnership designed to make the technology more accessible in a cloud and DevOps landscape. The collaboration will see new services being launched to help organisations develop, test, and monitor applications in the mainframe. The services will be available on IBM’s Cloud Managed Services on zSystems, otherwise known as zCloud. Clients using zCloud can now take advantage of four new services: CA Brightside, which aids in developing applications for the mainframe using existing open source tools and frameworks; CA Service Virtualization, which focuses on rapidly testing and modifying applications already in place; CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence, for monitoring applications in the cloud; and CA Data Content Discovery for data protection to assist with compliance regulations. According to a blog post from the two companies, almost 80% of all enterprise data is managed on the mainframe, while more than 90% of the world’s top 100 banks house data on there. While many column inches over the years have opined on the death of the mainframe, many others have issued a rebuttal. The IBM and CA partnership can certainly be put into the latter category.