Improving Agility
It's harder today to manage to your peaks and valleys: World events, and your customers' ability to respond to them in real time, often set the pace.

Beyond just operating efficiently and cost-effectively, mainframes now need to be agile enough to accommodate the constant and rapid change that characterizes business today. The big barrier to that agility, ironically, is people. Accommodating business change requires good automated processes within mainframe operations.

That's because mainframes require more subject-matter experts to manage them, particularly as they grow in size and complexity. These subject matter experts are expensive, hard to find and not easily re-deployable outside their domains.

Software with built-in intelligence can make these highly skilled experts more interchangeable. Some mainframe-management products today incorporate "advisor" technology, which enables the software to manage complex tasks independently and make complex decisions for the user—all but eliminating the need for specialized skills. This allows your staff to recover business applications or databases quickly without calling in an expert on the internals—enabling mainframe teams to be much more responsive and scalable.

Built-in intelligence also lets experts implement highly automated, rules-based processes for labor-intensive tasks such as backup-and-recovery and routine performance management. This frees the experts to focus on more strategic activities, such as fine-tuning resources to better meet application service levels.

Simply put, by using management software with built-in intelligence, you can do more with less. You can manage more MIPS, increase workloads, grow transaction volumes and add more applications without adding staff. When people and expertise can be automated to this level, it makes mainframe operations much more responsive to business change.

Improving Continuity
Business continuity is a priority. If IT systems aren't working properly, they can disrupt business, resulting in lost revenues, unacceptable levels of risk and brand damage. The ability to prevent IT problems from disrupting business—or to recover quickly from IT problems to minimize disruption—is one way that mainframes bring demonstrable value.

Here again, the key is having the right software to help the mainframe and the IT staff conduct business. The right software will enable IT to proactively and holistically manage the mainframe—to prevent business-crippling problems, proactively manage incidents and keep critical resources available by optimizing batch workloads and backing up data without taking it offline.

Most importantly, it will enable IT to cut through system complexity and manage what really matters to the business—transactions, applications and processes that make money. The biggest opportunity for demonstrably improving business continuity lies in managing business transactions. The software you choose should let IT staff quickly and easily get to the root cause of problems in transactions—even if those problems originate deep inside the mainframe.