Evolving DevOps at Your Own Pace: The Future of Modern Development on IBM^® i and IBM Z^®

Every organization’s modernization journey looks a little different. Some enterprises use modernization as an opportunity to start fresh, ripping out existing infrastructure and transforming it all at once. Others have mission-critical systems that can’t afford disruption and instead take a steadier, step-by-step approach.

What matters isn’t how fast you modernize – instead, it’s about how effectively you align your modernization strategy with your business goals, technology landscape, and people.

Modernization with IBM^® i and IBM Z^®

For organizations running IBM i and IBM Z, the systems at the core of their operations are among the most stable and resilient in the world. In many cases, there’s no need (or desire) to completely replace them. The challenge is evolving them to meet modern demands for speed, agility, and exceptional customer experiences.

Modernization in place is becoming the standard. By combining automation, AI, and intelligent analytics within a modern Developer Experience (DevEx) framework, organizations can evolve DevOps at their own pace without sacrificing reliability or control. At Rocket Software, we see this flexible approach delivering results across industries, unlocking the potential for what comes next.

How DevEx is set to change the game

DevOps has already transformed how organizations build, deploy, and maintain software. But even in the most mature environments there’s still room to evolve.

IDC research shows that developers today spend only 16% of their time actually coding. Inefficiencies and manual processes consume up to 20% of their week – an imbalance that drains creative energy, adds friction, and slows iteration.

The issue isn’t that DevOps doesn’t work. It’s that it can work better when the holistic developer experience becomes the guiding principle (as opposed to the more common strategy of popcorn-solving one-off problems with retrofitted single-use tools).

When developers have intuitive tools, automated workflows, and visibility across systems, they can move faster, collaborate more effectively, and focus on innovation.

A DevEx-driven approach reimagines modernization as a process that prioritizes the human experience as much as technical advancement, helping teams move forward in a way that’s sustainable, flexible, and impactful.

DevOps at your own pace

The most successful DevOps strategies are those designed to support both heritage modern approaches to development and deployment, including support for modern and green screen integrated development environment (IDE) environments, as well as support for a variety of third-party tools.  Done correctly, not only can an organization support all developers to work productively, but it can also test a new tool or process with a particular CI/CD pipeline instead of forcing implementation across all development. This reduces the risk of disruption to the DevOps team’s work while allowing the organization to find better ways to get high-quality code to production faster.

Empowering all developers and trialing new ways of working with minimal risk translates into tangible benefits for developers and the broader organization:

• Faster iterations. AI-assisted testing and intelligent automation reduce release times and improve accuracy, delivering higher-quality products faster.
• More time coding. Developers reclaim hours lost to manual tasks, freeing them to focus on innovation.
• Better collaboration. Unified workflows make it easier for teams to work together across departments and experience levels.
• Higher engagement and retention. A frictionless, positive environment improves satisfaction and reduces turnover.
• Stronger ROI. Productivity gains compound into measurable performance improvements that result in higher customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI.

Organizations with high developer velocity outperform peers by up to 5× in innovation-led growth and experience 20–30% fewer product defects and 20% higher employee experience scores. The implication is clear: when you prioritize the people behind the process, performance follows effortlessly.

The evolution starts here

We believe modernization of the DevOps environment should feel empowering, not disruptive. By focusing on the synergies between people, processes, and platforms, organizations can move forward with confidence and clarity, turning modernization into a continuous, human-centered evolution.

Rocket recently announced updates to its DevEx portfolio that empower organizations to evolve DevOps at their own pace: unifying heritage and modern environments through automation, AI, intelligent analytics, and intuitive workflows that deliver quality customer and user experiences.

• Workload Automation: Zena Secure Promote Add-on: Managing changes across test, production, and development environments is essential for smooth operations, as each requires specific adjustments to maintain compatibility. Without proper tools, developers waste valuable time on manual configurations and context switching, disrupting workflows and business continuity. Secure Promote is an add-on to your Zena instance to securely and automatically transfer new and updated definitions from one environment to the next.
• Rocket DevOps (for IBM i+): Organizations on IBM i+ often face delays due to late error detection and fragmented deployment processes, slowing innovation and developer productivity. With automated unit testing, 2-way Git integration, and Azure Pipelines integration, Rocket DevOps now enables earlier error detection and seamless CI/CD —accelerating releases, improving code quality by up to 25%, and empowering developers with choice, creating a more efficient, developer-friendly experience.
• Continuous Modernization: Integrating AI chatbots into home grown applications is often complex and time-consuming. With built-in LLM API integrations and ready-to-use examples in Rocket Continuous Modernization, Rocket makes it easy to quickly embed AI-driven search and support into Continuous Modernization applications, boosting workflow efficiency and enhancing user experiences in hours instead of weeks.
• TMON and Rocket^® Data Gateway^™: Fragmented mainframe and distributed environments hinder fast, cross-system insight. TMON and the Rocket Data Gateway (RDG) deliver metrics and event data from IBM z/OS subsystems and applications to modern analytics tools, delivering end-to-end observability of resource behavior and availability. Paired with TMON Health AI, teams can detect and examine system and application anomalies using predictive algorithms and intelligent trending, cutting resource utilization costs by an average of 25%.
• Enterprise Suite (for IBM Z): Modernize business-critical IBM Z applications while embracing Cloud for DevOps. Enterprise Suite brings CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and Git-based workflows into traditional environments, closing the gap between legacy systems and modern development. It provides advanced debugging, editing, and performance analysis tools—plus IDE integration for streamlined coding and real-time collaboration. Enterprise Suite also supports hybrid cloud environments, enabling smooth integration between on-prem and cloud platforms, while AI-driven insights help optimize performance, detect issues early, and accelerate delivery. The result is a unified, developer-friendly experience that drives faster innovation, reduces risk, and delivers continuous value at scale.