IBM Business Partners talk about System z

"Our clients are able to achieve significant cost reductions and compliance improvements when using eventACTION and ussACTION to assist them in managing their mainframe environments." Gord Tomlin, Action Software International (a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)

"BMC Software and IBM are committed to ensuring that the mainframe remains the most scalable, reliable and secure platform for commercial applications", said Bill Miller, senior vice president and general manager of BMC’s Mainframe Service Management business unit.  With our ‘day one’ support of IBM's zOS V1 Release 10, BMC Software is further demonstrating its ability to provide service optimization and efficiency improvements across the mainframe whenever our customers are ready to deploy the latest technologies.  BMC's recent mainframe industry survey indicated that the platform will continue to grow and attract new workloads and BMC's support of zOS Release 10 is just one more way we can demonstrate our leadership in technology innovation and give our customers superior support for their demanding and critical environments." - Bill Miller, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mainframe Service Management

"CA's comprehensive solutions for System z enable IT organizations to maximize the scalability, security, and reliability that continue to make the mainframe both the greenest and most cost-effective choice for hosting business-critical IT services." - Chris O’Malley, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Mainframe Business Unit

Customer quote from CA:

"As the volume and complexity of our IBM System z mainframe workloads keep growing, we need management tools that ensure our ability to keep pace—despite the resource constraints we face in IT," said Rich Resnick, Manager of Systems and Operations, University Community Hospital, a not-for profit community hospital network strategically represented throughout the Tampa, Fla. Metropolitan area. "By continuing to add high-value features and functionality to its already-rich management solutions portfolio, CA has demonstrated its ongoing commitment to fulfilling this need."

"The IBM mainframe has always been the platform of choice for the large scale enterprises that choose Model 204 as their strategic database platform. The ever increasing capacity, flexibility and reliability of the System z mainframes ensures that this platform will support the growth of their businesses. The new, entry-level machines will enable smaller enterprises to plan for growth with confidence." - Chris Ramsdale, Director of Strategic Product Planning

"Offering Cúram for deployment on Linux for IBM System z underscores our commitment to providing customers with the widest possible range of implementation choices," said Ronan Rooney, chief technology officer, Cúram Software. "The mainframe's mature and powerful industry leading virtualization technology has allowed IBM to continue to improve energy efficiency, add capacity dynamically and provide platform flexibility. Cúram applications deployed on Linux on System z will help our customers to further simplify their IT infrastructure and ultimately lower costs without sacrificing reliability - this is critical to the success of any software implementation."

"Designed to meet the evolving integration needs of System z mainframe customers, DataDirect Shadow provides a single, industry standard architecture to streamline legacy data access and mainframe SOA enablement, allowing organizations to more rapidly develop and deploy new business services with reduced complexity and cost. Shadow's patent-pending technology can exploit the zIIP and zAAP specialty engines across a wide range of workloads and target systems for lower mainframe TCO and improved performance." - Gregg Willhoit, Chief Software Architect, DataDirect Technologies.

"T-REX ensures the health of your ICF catalogs and TMC which are critical to data availability, integrity, recoverability. Xtinct ensures security standards are met by permanently and irrevocably deleting the original data. " - Murray Kruger, CEO

"DTS Software is committed to enhancing the mainframe platform by providing the most up to date software to meet the needs of our customers with support for z/OS 1.10 and EAV on GA of z/OS 1.10." - Don Thimsen, President

"Multiple platform consolidation into an integrated single computing platform not only reduces tangible operational costs, but also allows for a simplified, manageable, logical and coherent disaster recovery solution. IBM's System z10 Business Class machine is the ultimate consolidation platform." - Jim DeRemer, President, E-Net Corporation

"Our flagship mainframe SOA product, Ivory Service Architect, is designed for the System z, exploiting many of its key architectural strengths. GT Software is a leading mainframe SOA solution provider, with our products optimized for System z. In my opinion, the System z will continue to grow and emerge as the dominant server for mainframe Web services." - Steve Able, Vice President of R&D

"Our small to mid sized clients are increasingly asking for cost efficient IT solutions in light of the current economic climate. IBM's new, powerful z10 Business Class mainframe is a strong option for them, offering increased energy savings, decreased cooling costs and a smaller IT footprint -- a win-win all around." Tom Amodio, President, Vicom Infinity, Inc.

"Our customers tell us they need 24 x 7x 365 availability, the capability to sustain application growth, meet privileged information protection responsibilities and contain cost. And that is exactly the features we see IBM providing in the new IBM z10 processors and z/OS 1.10 operating system". -Thomas J Meehan, Vice President

"As critical as product and service differentiation is in the global Property & Casualty Insurance Industry, business interruption is inexcusable. Innovation Group clients deploying our enterprise software solutions on System z leverage the mainframe's unparallel performance and bullet-proof reliability to gain competitive advantage in this highly competitive industry."

Andrew Labrot, Jr., CTO, Innovation Group

"As critical as product and service differentiation is in the global Property & Casualty Insurance Industry, business interruption is inexcusable. Innovation Group clients deploying our enterprise software solutions on System z leverage the mainframe's unparallel performance and bullet-proof reliability to gain competitive advantage in this highly competitive industry."

"RealTime Defrag (RTD) installations optimize use of their mainframe DASD space in real-time while ensuring SLAs are met and energy costs are reduced." Howard Kirby, Director International Operations

"I/S Management Strategies, Ltd.'s LPAR Capacity and Software Usage Analysis (LCS) is ready on Day 1 to assist sites in auditing and managing their IBM software charges on all levels of z/OS and any System z hardware." Al Sherkow, I/S Management Strategies, Ltd

"Much like enterprise customers, SMB’s are facing information overload and are striving to reduce the inefficiency and complexity of today’s data centers. The IBM z10BC mainframe will help these customers manage information through IBM storage, virtualization and software solutions while providing specialty engines to simplify the human process to run the mainframe." Steve Madonia, Sales Manager - System z, Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS)

"Clients use our mainframe printing, debugging, and productivity software tools to deliver robust, reliable and secure mainframe applications to their end users and business units." Mike Marler, President, MacKinney Systems, Inc.

Whether our customers are enterprise or small businesses, they are interested in an open and flexible IT solution," said Doug Harrell, VP of Sales for System z, Mainline Information Systems. "The IBM z10BC, like its predecessor the z10EC, offers our customers a scale up solution supporting a broad range of workloads, from Linux to XML to Java."

"When our SMB customers select the IBM z10BC mainframe, they will automatically choose a new enterprise data center," said Dan Nassif, Vice President, Mainframe Solutions Practice, MSI Systems Integrators. "This unmatched combination of high performance, reduced energy costs and security components easily respond to our customer’s ever changing business conditions."

"NEON Enterprise Software, Inc. is committed to providing value-add solutions which utilize and exploit the power of IBM’s System Z technology. We are partners in helping our combined customers understand that with its reliability, security, scalability, and overall lower TCO, there is no better source for business application computing than System Z."

"The mainframe is a fundamental technology and architecture that is not going away anytime soon and if students want to have careers in information technology and computer science in the future, IBM System z needs to be a foundation for their learned technologies. Through working with IBM’s Academic Initiative for System z program, I’ve been able to get access IBM experts, tools and resources necessary to help my students build careers around large enterprise skills and the mainframe, a career path that is ripe with opportunity." Cameron Seay, professor, North Carolina Central University

"In a market where green computing, consolidation and virtualization are at the forefront of every CIO's agenda, the IBM System z mainframe represents a solid alternative to distributed platforms," said Justin Steinman, Vice President of Solutions and Product Marketing, Novell. "Many customers look to run Linux on System z, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z on the new IBM z10 BC gives customers and business partners technology that delivers exceptional scalability, flexibility, and resiliency at a lower total entry point. Novell is pleased to collaborate with IBM, offering reduced pricing for SLES for System z10 BC, and to further invest in our clients success, Novell is also extending a free self-study kit with the purchase of the IBM z10 BC with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z. For customers looking to run Linux on z, this is a great opportunity and pricing structure for them."

"OpenTech Systems Inc. is a leading provider of Comprehensive Solutions for Disaster Recovery, Data and Storage Management, Encryption and Tape Data Migration for IBM z/OS centric data centers. From infrastructure backup and critical application data identification to virtual tape backup and migration, OpenTech Systems provides a suite of products for Disaster Recovery Assurance and compliance. OpenTech products are used worldwide to automate DR processes, lower tape media and hardware expenses while reducing backup windows and administrative requirements." - Terry Siegrist, Vice President.

"A growing number of customers are integrating System z virtual Linux servers into their Oracle Grid strategy. IBM’s new System z B10 server extends the reach and the affordability of this solution. The z10 BC platform is an attractive option for customers moving to virtualized environments." Matt Puccini, Senior Director, Oracle

"Complex threads of application processing invoke hundreds of programs in typical mainframe legacy applications. For the analyst who is changing or enhancing one of these applications, success is dependent upon understanding these complex threads. Ironically, traditional approaches to analysis (tools or manual) are program-oriented not application-oriented.

PathPoint materializes these complex threads of application processing by tracing and capturing user-entered business transactions of interest - without any change to source code. Understand how legacy applications "really" work on System z – with PathPoint." - Tom Cushing

"(E)JES customers agree that robust spool and system management is one of the qualities of service that help make z/OS and System z their first choice for deployment of new business applications." – Amy Gilbert, Marketing Manager

“PKWARE has seen the demand for protection of sensitive information through a more 'data-centric security solution' continue to grow--especially on the System z Platform where the bulk of today's data is found. SecureZIP for z/OS leverages the native AES 192-and 256-bit algorithms plus the CPACF (CP Assist for Cryptographic Function) offered on the new System z10 Business Class to deliver a significant performance boost to our customers through its expanded support of hardware cryptography.”

Joe Sturonas, Chief Technology Officer PKWARE, Inc.

CFI: "By deploying CyberFusion Integration Suite™ (CFI) for managed file transfer, on the IBM mainframe, our clients can integrate all major computing platforms in their organization while securely automating the movement of key data across enterprise systems, platforms, and applications."

SecurAccess: "SecurAccess™, from Proginet, is a single sign-on solution for the IBM mainframe that enables users to access corporate resources and applications using a single, secure password. SecurAccess™ can be combined with hardware tokens to provide two-factor authentication."

SecurForce: "By deploying SecurForce™ for Sync and Reset, on the mainframe, clients have reported up to 90 percent reduction in password-related help desk costs – resulting in rapid ROI, and significant productivity and efficiency gains." – Kevin Bohin, CIO

Red Hat is the leading provider of open source solutions, serving global enterprises through technology and services made possible by the innovative open source business model. Through the Linux on Mainframe program launched in May 2007, Red Hat and IBM have teamed to provide value to customers with the delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframes.

“The next-generation, business-class mainframe from IBM is a great opportunity for existing IBM mainframe customers to migrate to a fast, reliable platform, and offers new customers the opportunity to streamline their datacenters with an affordable solution,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. “Since expanding our partnership with IBM through the Linux-on-Mainframe Program, we've seen strong momentum in customer and partner interest in our joint Red Hat and IBM solutions. In a natural next step, we've worked with IBM to provide our customers with significant price and performance advantages for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the new IBM z10 business-class mainframe."

"Our enterprise clients view System z as the best platform for their high volume batch processing. As they progress towards continuous operation in a global, shared data environment, our System z customers must endow their batch applications with restart capability so they can better tolerate abends and downtime. Smart/RESTART from RAI enables z/OS batch applications to restart from near the point of failure after abends, recompiles, even system IPLs -- with all resources in a consistent state. Often without changes to application source code. RAI’s active support of System z ensures Smart/RESTART customers can exploit the latest z/OS enhancements (such as Extended Address Volumes - EAV), contemporaneous with their IBM General Availability dates." - Carl Feinberg, CEO

"System z is the 'gold standard' for enterprise computing, and we have worked with IBM for more than 20 years to help organizations maximize the value and performance of their mainframe investments. We are proud to partner with IBM to create a wide range of products that extend the functionality of System z, and we believe that their suite of offerings are unparalleled in today's computing world."

"Since deploying SAP applications on System z, our customers have realized significant business benefit, said Bernhard Heininger, development manager, IBM System z, SAP AG. "In particular, our customers who have the highest availability and security requirements have achieved their business objectives by leveraging the technology offered by System z."

"IBM's mainframe systems are important to the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform. IBM’s new System z10 Business Class mainframe enables SAS customers to execute business intelligence and advanced analytic functions at an enterprise level on state-of-the-art hardware. By working together to ensure critical BI and analytic applications can operate effectively on the mainframe – which helps significantly reduce energy, space and cooling costs – SAS and IBM are actively enabling their mutual customers to support their own corporate sustainability efforts. "– Craig Rubendall, Director, Research and Development

"Select Business Solution, with its many years of experiece and support of the mainframe (System z) environment, provides efficient, real-time, reporting access to critical business data enabling our clients to improve service, productivity and overall decision making." - Roger Cox, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

"We are very excited about the new generation of System z," said Joe Mertens, President, Sirius Computer Solutions. "Its capabilities around Linux and system consolidation will allow us to provide significant cost savings due to optimization and power efficiency. This IBM technology allows us to offer a solution to help simplify our clients' environments with unmatched reliability and scalability."

"The demands being placed on core transactional systems, such as trading platforms, continue to grow to unprecedented levels. What hasn’t grown are the budgets required to support these mission-critical systems," said Joe Gentry, Software AG’s Chief Technology Officer for the Enterprise Transaction Systems division. "By moving aggressively to support new and emerging platforms such as [zMR], Software AG is helping customers take advantage of faster and more efficient systems to meet these requirements

"Providing Linux and OpenSolaris for System z technology on the same System z processor allows customers to put their amassed skills from both the open systems and traditional mainframe world together for the optimum match in software and hardware technology." - David Boyes, President/CTO

"SyncSort for z/OS goes beyond mere compatibility with System z technology, exploiting zIIP, MIDAW and PAV functionality to deliver significant performance benefits." - Ken Cooper, Manager, Product Engineering

"Syracuse University recognizes the importance of teaching mainframe and large enterprise computing skills to the future IT professional who aspires to be a leader in large scale computing technology issues. The curriculum we have created, with the tools and resources from IBM, has provided a great way to introduce our students to fundamental transactions systems like the System z computing platform, that will help to be the foundation for their careers for decades to come." David Dischiavé, Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies

"IBM’s System z systems are the “core” of Unicom Systems software business. The z10 BC provides Unicom Customers current System z technology, at a more affordable price/performance ratio.The z10 BC provides key hardware components, such as Crypto, zIIP, zAAP, IFL and the Integrated Coupling Facility Processors. These hardware components are needed by Unicom customers in Sysplex or CicsPlex CICS MRO systems, to allow the use of new CICS/TS features such as Coupling facility Data Tables, and “Shared” temporary storage. SOA and Web enablement of CICS/TS systems, are driving the requirement for CicsPlex systems that can be workload balanced across several System z systems or LPARs." - Larry Lawler, CTO, Unicom Systems

"Voltage SecureData allows z/OS customers to easily encrypt Personally Identifiable Information, both "at rest" (in the databases where it resides) and "in motion" (as it traverses the network), thus protecting against identity theft and improving compliance with PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, FACTA "Red Flag", HIPAA, SB 1386, European and Japanese privacy regulations, et al. With Voltage’s transparent stateless key server that links data to identities, groups, and roles, traditional key management headaches are avoided; and with Format Preserving Encryption, the data can remain encrypted throughout the lifecycle of a transaction, with complete or partial decryption only at the final destination as appropriate—all without changes to database schema or middleware. The same technology can also be applied to mask data for QA/testing, thus avoiding data leaks while providing realistic test environments." - Phil Smith III