Since the arrival of the PC in the early 1980s, the demise of the mainframe has been talked about. In the last three decades we’ve seen the emergence and impact of client/server, distributed computing, blade computing and, more recently, cloud computing. Despite this, for large enterprises, multinationals, banking, manufacturing and governments, the mainframe is still present in the IT estate and runs some of the most business critical workloads.
Investments made in the mainframe platform and the challenge of incorporating it into the workflow of a broader developer community is being recognized by the leading providers of mainframe tool support. Some of the traditional tools serving the platform have not evolved to keep in step with the sophisticated capabilities of tools serving the market today. They have not implemented many of the rich productivity features that are now considered to be standard in tools for the future.
In this spotlight review report we assess Serena’s support strategy for improving the change management of mainframe application assets and enabling a broader community of developers to support the mainframe platform.
