Friday, December 28, 2018

Mainframe Synergies for Digital Transformation

In Jul of 2018, Broadcom announced its intentions to acquire CA Technologies.  In the press release, Hock Tan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Broadcom, said:

 “This transaction represents an important building block as we create one of the world’s leading infrastructure technology companies. With its sizeable installed base of customers, CA is uniquely positioned across the growing and fragmented infrastructure software market, and its mainframe and enterprise software franchises will add to our portfolio of mission critical technology businesses. We intend to continue to strengthen these franchises to meet the growing demand for infrastructure software solutions.”
While those words look really nice on paper, the acquisition is now old news. With crunch time now here, customers of both companies are now asking,” What’s in it for me?”

Broadcom’s pursuit of this merger grew from a recognition of the magnitude of the data center
market opportunity.  Rapid growth in the companies networking and storage businesses was being driven by the even faster growth in the industry’s need to securely and reliably scale data centers.  This datacenter metamorphosis was, in turn, being driven by digital transformation initiatives across literally every industry. Always looking to improve values to their individual customers, the merger gave existing customers of both corporations the opportunity to benefit from the natural synergy of Broadcom’s industry-leading IT Infrastructure offerings and CA’s industry-leading suite of mainframe solutions.


Since the mainframe holds most of today’s enterprise data, two of CA Technology industry leading products, Zowe and Brightside, were seen as perfect compliments to any organization’s digital transformation efforts.  As a new open source software framework, Zowe provides solutions that allow development and operations teams to securely, manage, control, script and develop on the Mainframe like any other cloud platform. When paired with Brightside’s automation and self-service capabilities, this combination unlocks additional mainframe business value through cost and risk reduction. Brightside empowers next-generation developers to more easily apply their experience with modern DevOps toolchains and frameworks, helping to increase their ability to innovate for the mainframe platform.

The value of these offerings paired with Broadcom’s IT infrastructure offerings is immense.  Value of offering. Working with Broadcom’s infrastructure, enterprises can now fully meet today’s data context challenges which include:
  • Data complexity and disparate data silos that inhibit growth and drive up costs; and
  • Multiple data formats and exponential data growth further complicate the matter.
New processes that enhance business situational awareness are also helped by this combination. Organizations can now abandon the legacy view of customer engagement as a “point in time” event. With broader situational awareness, business owners can now effectively manage every customer across all of their possible touch points.  This capability enables true understanding of what a customer is doing in real-time, informing correct actions and up to the moment personalization.  The end result is a digital transformation that enhances the organization’s ability to be continuously active and engaged with your end customer in a meaningful and engaging manner.

If your organization is undertaking or undergoing digital transformation, reach out to Greg Lotko to learn more about the mainframe synergies you can gain from the Broadcom CA Technologies merger. As the General Manager for Broadcom Mainframe Business Unit, he can bring his more than 30 years of experience in application development, application outsourcing services, software development and infrastructure to your transformation initiative. His team, in fact, helped HSBC transition to weekly release cycles, which was foundational to that company’s ability to deliver 2000 deployments per month. This feat is even more impressive knowing that the financial services giant manages over 6 million artifacts through applications written by over 6,000 developers making 750,000 element changes a year.


This post was brought to you by Broadcom.



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