The bank, one of Europe's largest private banks, is facing a common IT management challenge. The bank has stopped developing new mainframe applications and allowed its mainframe development staff to shrink by about 30% through attrition. However, the bank's mainframe development needs are increasing. The use of the bank's mainframe applications and data by new and existing distributed, web, and mobile applications is increasing. Developers no longer build new COBOL applications but must constantly modify mainframe code to assist non-mainframe applications. The bank can't wait forever for coding changes to be completed. Competition in the financial services market is intense, making time-to-benefit important, whether for customers' mobile experiences or new capabilities for staff, and putting pressures on the mainframe software development lifecycle. That lifecycle has to produce defect-free code. The bank's mainframe applications are critical to everything it does and everything customers and regulators expect. Mainframe test/QA must be rigorous and fast. If the testing process uncovers a problem, it must be rapidly and accurately diagnosed, fixed, and tested again.

The IMT Group, a leading Midwestern P&C insurer, heavily relies on its mainframe for core applications. However, the mainframe application environment is in transition. The company's mainframe transition strategy has two key objectives. One is re-platforming select applications, a process that requires intensive analysis of current mainframe code. It requires complete and accurate identification of “dead code”—sections of applications that have lapsed into disuse over the years, but remain present in source code. The other key objective is converging mainframe and non-mainframe environments. This convergence is taking place because of how the company’s newer web- and mobile-based applications depend on back-end mainframe resources. Both of these strategic objectives require developers to have clear, complete visibility into the structure and runtime behaviors of highly complex mainframe applications that have undergone a lot of change over the years and are not always well-documented.

IT Solutions Austria, the IT services branch of the Erste Group, a leading financial services company in Central and Eastern Europe, was tasked with maintaining the quality and cost efficiency of the Erste Group’s data center operations. In 2012, the company decided to outsource mainframe operations, which led to a re-evaluation of all its mainframe vendor relationships to see if it could reduce costs by further consolidating with other vendors. IT Solutions Austria was already using Compuware Strobe to analyze the behavior of its mainframe applications, and it valued the capabilities Strobe provided. However, the company considered migrating to a competing solution to save money.

Helvetia, a Swiss insurance company with over $39 billion in assets under management and more than five million customers across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, relies heavily on its IBM mainframe for all of its core applications. These applications support the company's underwriting, policy management, and financials. However, like many companies, Helvetia faces a two-fold challenge when it comes to these core mainframe applications. The first part of the challenge is a declining supply of skilled, experienced mainframe developers. This declining supply has not yet become a major crisis, but in five years or so, it may be. So Helvetia has to prepare now for that future shortage. The second part of the challenge is the relentless demand on mainframe applications. Those applications must be constantly updated and modified to provide customers with the insurance products and service experiences they demand. So mainframe development has to be fast, reliable, and ready to perform at scale in the production environment. This means Helvetia needs to empower fewer developers with potentially less mainframe experience to deliver more consistent, quality work faster than ever.

Mike Wells, the Director of Software Development at Ameritas, a mutual life and health insurer with $35.6 billion in assets, was tasked with helping the company achieve competitive advantage in an increasingly digital marketplace. However, he faced a significant challenge. The majority of Wells’ software development experience was on distributed platforms; yet about 70% of his developer workforce at Ameritas was mainframe focused. Coming from a background where automation and visibility were at the forefront of every Java developer, he realized that this presented a challenge in the mainframe arena. Wells was skeptical about whether their tools and processes could provide the speed and agility Ameritas needed to thrive in a fast moving digital marketplace.

Comerica Incorporated, a financial services company headquartered in Dallas, offers three strategically aligned business segments for its customers: business banking, retail banking and wealth and institutional management. It is imperative that the online documentation system that backs up account and document withdrawals, deposits and other account activity works efficiently for a multistate network of more than 500 branch, lending and investment offices. At the heart of the company’s documentation process is the vendor-supplied Comerica Online Documents (COLD) application that archives, restores and retrieves these types of reports electronically. When this application was originally installed, the company started backing up a month’s worth of statements on a mainframe disk drive. Any request for account statements from over a month, however, was backed up on tape. To improve application response time, Comerica moved a year’s worth of account statements from tape to the mainframe disk drive. The company expected to see better response time, but that wasn’t the case. The system took the same amount of time to retrieve the account statements as it did before its IT team implemented the change.

A software company faced a challenge when the only employee who knew the intricate details of the company’s mainframe SCM solution—a homegrown Assembler application built around IBM Source Configuration and Library Management (SCLM) for z/OS—announced his retirement. The company's development occurs on the mainframe, requiring a team with decades of niche technical knowledge and skills. However, the software development team is small, and the loss of even one developer significantly impacts productivity. The company planned to hire a replacement for the retiring developer, but it quickly realized it would be unreasonable to train someone new to support an antiquated Assembler-SCLM tool that wasn’t core to the company’s business. The Assembler-SCLM tool impeded the acceleration of application development and delivery, a crippling disadvantage in a digital age where the pace of a “dinosaur” has long been superseded by industry-disrupting Agile “unicorns.”

Standard Bank, a major international financial services group based in South Africa, has been focusing on driving Agile, DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to grow strategic digital, digitization, infrastructure and application software engineering capabilities. The core of Standard Bank’s portfolio, which includes corporate and private banking, sits on the mainframe, accounting for 80 percent of processing. As the system of record, it’s also the foundation for much of the bank’s frontend digital transformation. However, as Standard Bank’s digital transformation process matured, the mainframe had to be repositioned to mitigate risks between it and the rest of the Agile and DevOps framework supporting CI/CD. There were several cultural, process-related and tooling impediments to integrating the mainframe into that framework.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. (CHT), a leading telecommunications company in Taiwan, was facing challenges with its existing billing system. The company, which provides services in fixed line, mobile communications, and data communications, has a subscriber base of 23 million. The billing system, based on an IBM mainframe, tracks billing for calls, collates monthly statistics relating to telephone charges, bill consolidation, bill delivery, clearing, bill collection, suspension, resumption and the stopping of phone services, refunds, arrears tracking and bad debt management. With an annual bill turnover of about NT$180 billion, it is Taiwan’s largest telecommunications billing system. However, the increasing competition in the industry and the launch of many new businesses and services, including ADSL, home broadband and MOD businesses and related services, were putting a strain on the billing system. The company needed to enhance its billing system to meet the growing needs of its value-added business development services.

A Global Health Service Company (GHSC) was managing an enterprise-wide DevOps initiative that included mainframe applications teams. The company wanted an integrated IDE for mainframe developers that included program analysis and an intelligent editor that could provide immediate feedback on code changes as developers edit the code. The GHSC is a licensed user of SonarSource products for distributed source code syntax checking. Their management desired similar capabilities for their mainframe DevOps efforts. Quick and immediate feedback on code errors would reduce rework, reduce the number of compiles and improve the quality of COBOL programs released to production. They also wanted their mainframe developers to use similar capabilities and tooling as their distributed systems counterparts.

The Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PFCU) is a globally operating financial institution with over $15 billion in assets. It serves more than one million members of the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, defense-related companies, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The institution relies heavily on Hogan financial applications, primarily written in COBOL with some Assembler code, for its day-to-day operations. However, PFCU faced a challenge when it planned to upgrade to newer releases of the z/OS operating system. The provider of its debugging tool could not guarantee that the software would continue to work properly with the proposed upgrades. Additionally, the debugging tool had several quirks and idiosyncrasies that developers had to contend with, such as not accepting 'Go Back'—a common coding statement used frequently in the Hogan application.

A major multinational financial services company was undergoing a digital transformation to meet new customer demands for innovative services. However, the company's mainframe was siloed, operating with Waterfall-based processes and antiquated tools, which caused delays in major projects. The mainframe developers were still using 3270 emulators for coding, which lacked the benefits of modern tools. The mainframe team had no automation in place, requiring multiple people and teams to move code from check-in to deploy and from development to production. There was no automated testing in place to handle online and batch testing, and there was a lack of testing frameworks as well as lack of integration with automated testing tools. The mainframe team had too many disparate systems involved in the process, so a developer/release manager would have to jump from one system to the next. With minimal change management integration, tracking changes end to end was a manual task.

Hapag-Lloyd, a leading global container shipping company, needed to create a realistic and production-like environment for core IT applications without disclosing any potentially competitive information. The company tests new application functionality using real data, a practice that helps ensure that issues are eliminated before any changes are put into production. However, due to the high level of integration of Hapag-Lloyd’s IT environment, which consists of its mainframe and a range of distributed systems, this was a challenging task. A new challenge arose in 2014 when Hapag-Lloyd prepared for a potential merger. This made it necessary to extend existing training materials and create up-to-date live training data. The challenge was to create a realistic and production-like environment for core IT applications without disclosing any potentially competitive information. As a result, Hapag-Lloyd realized it needed a test data privacy/optimization solution that would allow it to securely share this information with a huge number of new employees around the world, while remaining compliant with its high standards of data protection.

The company, a major communications industry service provider located in the United States, was struggling with Source Code Management (SCM). Their existing mainframe code management tools were outdated and could not keep up with the pace of change in today's world of agile development and rapid programming styles. The in-house developed SCM processes were inefficient and inconsistent, resulting in unnecessary errors. Deployments would slip out without all of the correct software changes and updates incorporated. Old and new versions of software were being deployed in error. There wasn’t a standardized way to implement changes. Procedures for version control and verification processes were not standardized. As a result, ‘clean-up’ of existing libraries was inconsistent, so that old versions of software would remain in ‘updated’ libraries. Changes could be made at any level making auditing, repeatability and traceability difficult.

The Global Health Service Company (GHSC) was managing an enterprise-wide DevOps initiative that included mainframe applications teams. The company wanted to execute COBOL source code security and syntax checking for every mainframe product release from its claims processing team. The company performs security and code syntax scans on their distributed and mobile apps and needed to duplicate that process for the mainframe teams. The company also needed the ability to manage mainframe and distributed code releases in a similar manner. This would provide quick feedback of issues to development and give management a common dashboard (SonarQube) for analyzing application code quality. These scans are critical for Continuous Integration practices for the enterprise DevOps effort.

Physicians Mutual, an insurance company, was struggling with the management of millions of lines of complex mainframe code. The lack of documentation and tools to manage this code led to long development cycles, preventing the company from capitalizing on critical business opportunities. The complexity of the mainframe code and the absence of tools to manage it resulted in missed opportunities to capitalize on immediate business interests. The company needed a solution that would help them understand and manage their complex applications, speed up maintenance and development cycles, and attract and retain top developer talent.

Royal Bank of Canada’s Information Technology division needed to make sure its test data management software was efficient enough to handle the bank’s ever-expanding list of financial services for its customers, and that all new applications interfaced well with existing ones. The bank’s IT division needed to make more efficient use of its resources, while performing test data management projects more quickly and affordably. Faced with increasing customer expectations, the IT organization had to ensure that the bank’s growing list of financial service offerings would function properly and efficiently, and that its new applications would complement existing ones.