Software Company Consolidates and Modernizes SCM with ISPW
Company Size
11-200
Product
- Compuware ISPW
Tech Stack
- IBM Source Configuration and Library Management (SCLM)
- Assembler
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Manufacturing System Automation
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The customer is a software company that develops business applications and operating system utilities on the mainframe. The company has a small team of developers with decades of niche technical knowledge and skills. The company's mainframe SCM solution was a homegrown Assembler application built around IBM Source Configuration and Library Management (SCLM) for z/OS. The company was facing a challenge when the only employee who knew the intricate details of the company’s mainframe SCM solution announced his retirement. 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 Challenge
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development and delivery, a crippling disadvantage in a digital age where the pace of a “dinosaur” has long been superseded by industry-disrupting Agile “unicorns.”
The Solution
The company scoured the SCM market for a singular tool before finding ISPW, an Agile SCM, release automation, and deployment automation solution. The company was enthusiastic about the features ISPW offered, but the decision to implement ISPW came after Compuware’s acquisition of the tool in January 2016. ISPW’s multiple development areas enable concurrent development. The company’s programmers would be able to work in parallel and improve collaboration through features like lifecycle management that shows multiple versions of code in flight, end-to-end tracking of every action that affects code running at any level, and an audit trail of all activities throughout the development lifecycle. With ISPW, developers can rollback some or all code changes at once and replace a current production program with a valid previous program version, something their Assembler-SCLM tool was limited in. In ISPW, production source is synchronized with rollback so versions always match. ISPW’s modern, intuitive web interface would make it easier for developers to view the status of all deploy requests and the environments into which code was deployed.
Operational Impact
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Factor-y S.r.l. – Establishes a cost-effective, security-rich development environment with SoftLayer technology
Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.
Case Study
Darwin Ecosystem: Accelerating discovery and insight through cutting-edge big data and cognitive technologies
Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.
Case Study
Zend accelerates, simplifies PHP development
Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.
Case Study
Delivering modern data protection with cloud scale backup from Cobalt Iron and IBM
Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.
Case Study
Achieving near limitless scalability and flexibility with data in the cloud
Web-based publishing platform SpaceCraft found that as its client base grew, it was spending an increasing amount of time managing its databases, distracting its focus from product innovation. As its user base rapidly expanded, data volumes at SpaceCraft began to rise dramatically. Along with their main focus on maintaining and further developing a great platform for web publishing, the SpaceCraft team had the added pressure of managing the increasing quantities of data while ensuring ongoing high performance for clients.
Case Study
nViso SA – Delivers emotion recognition solutions worldwide with a scalable SoftLayer hosting solution
nViso SA, a company that provides emotion recognition solutions, was in need of a high-performance cloud hosting infrastructure. The company wanted to extend its services to a global customer base. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle the demands of their growing customer base and the need for high performance and reliability.
