Six ways to adapt to mainframe software changes with Rocket® ChangeMan® ZMF (formerly a Micro Focus® product)

Change is Inevitable

Did you know mainframes are used by 71% of Fortune 500 companies, and mainframes process 90% of credit card transactions (IBM)? The mainframe isn’t going anywhere— but there are going to be changes. Software organizations must always look for new ways to adapt change in an ever-expanding software landscape. Challenges are often juxtaposed between software development practices such as Agile, waterfall, or hybrid, while they adopt modern software practices such as CIDC, DevOps or DevSecOps. What can’t be ignored are the governance and regulatory compliances companies need to implement and abide by in highly regulated industries such as finance, government, insurance, education, logistics, and airlines. Compliance can’t be an afterthought—it needs to be folded into every software development organization.

Many Vendors are Not Keeping up With Change

In this modern world, many vendors are not investing the time, effort, and capital needed to keep up with change. Is your vendor meeting the application requirements, regulatory compliance, or even the security needs that your organization demands from mainframe change software. Even worse, your vendor may have been raising prices, without delivering features, or providing adequate support. They may not even be listening to your needs. We’ve heard it repeatedly—and it creates a huge problem for you—as your organization needs to keep up with the changes going forward.

Six Ways Rocket ChangeMan ZMF Can Help

Rocket ChangeMan ZMF can help. For more than three decades organizations have trusted Rocket ChangeMan ZMF for building and managing their mission-critical applications. Organizations with the most complex applications, including finance, government, and others. Industries that need security and stability.

Here are six ways that ChangeMan ZMF can help your organization adapt to mainframe software changes, meet application requirements, regulation compliance, and security needs.

1. Manage every code change across the entire software development lifecycle

ChangeMan manages every code change and guarantees data integrity to ensure only successfully tested programs are deployed. At the heart of ChangeMan are Change Packages. These are first-class objects. Change Packages answer the question of why a change was made. Because it's a first-class object, users can quickly see and compare them with other Change Packages across any release or stage, promote them, merge them, compile them, and if needed, back out any change swiftly within seconds. Better yet, no need to be down at the individual file level. The basic principles of Change Packages have enabled organizations to build and manage the most complex deployments for Enterprise-class releases on ChangeMan ZMF.

2. Fully manage and track every asset

From inception through delivery, every asset is fully managed and tracked. Every transaction has touch points for who, what, when, where, and most importantly the why.

3. Integrate with peripherals that sit outside the mainframe

With an agnostic “freedom of choice” approach, developers can use the tools they are most familiar with to support innovative approaches to software development and software delivery. There are combinations of applications on and off the mainframe. With a mainframe skills shortage and gap, customers have been able to extend ChangeMan to integrate with the peripherals that sit outside the mainframe. Hybrid teams can use ChangeMan, TOPAZ, IDz, GIT, VS Code, ZOWE, Eclipse, or a myriad of other tools without sacrifice.

4. Adapt to changing business needs with built-in advanced workflow management

Unlike other software configuration and change management systems for the mainframe, ChangeMan was built from its inception to grow and adapt as your business needs change. With built-in advanced workflow management, ChangeMan ZMF meets any challenge, enabling the ability to create any workflow to manage development and delivery. Today’s new normal, means software organizations have to adopt more modern tooling practices and methodologies, while maintaining an application with the highest integrity and without sacrificing auditing and security measures.

5. Build integrations to support end-to-end delivery with REST services

ChangeMan ZMF uses REST services to help organizations build integrations to support their end-to-end delivery, such as Jenkins or SonarQube for CICD and code analysis.

6. Protect and encapsulate the full software development lifecycle

From the developers’ fingertips through deployment, the full software development lifecycle is encapsulated and protected under ChangeMan. With an agnostic viewpoint on the front end, ChangeMan ZMF enables developers to have a “freedom of choice”, while on the backend the VAULT is protected and secure.

Be Prepared

Change is constant. The way that your organization works today will change tomorrow. Prepare for that change. See how ChangeMan ZMF can help you keep up with change and ensure the security, consistency, integrity, and flexibility of the information on your mainframe.