Solution for mainframe SW products management

Business need

Living in times of economic crisis means working with IT budgets that, in the best cases, are flat. Most of the times IT budgets are decreasing year on year. If a company wants to stay competitive, a deep analysis of its software products portfolio has to be performed, in order to optimize the investments.
Starting point of all these activities is a constantly updated and effective software inventory, based on real utilization data.In order to obtain this info, it’s no longer possible to use local tools or manual lists that, when you need them are never updated at the current status.
This solution allows customer to automate the process, supports deep analysis on presence and utilization of product libraries. As final target, this solution will allow customer to perform effective Software Asset Management policy in order to define effective software costs optimization actions.

Architectural diagram

Solution is based on Tivoli Asset Discovery for z/OS, as this component is able to recognize software products matching presence data (collected through scanning of storage DASDs) against a constantly updated knowledge base it has.Once the SW product is recognized, is able to understand if a product is used or not, intercepting all the calls to load modules. All the data is in a database accessed by a web browser (provided with the product) and can be accessed in HTML, CSV, XLS or TXT format.
Old copies or local versions are also recognized. This allows customer to perform effective software portfolio governance, being able to provide immediate answers to SW compliances.

Prerequisite software

Solution requires IBM Tivoli Asset Discovery for z/OS V7.5 (5698-B39). This product is able to identify all load modules libraries related to each software product (IBM and not IBM) and it’s able to intercept all load modules calls. Central environment where all the data is collected requires a DB2 z/OS database. For this reason, on the image where central repository is placed, DB2 z/OS V8 (or higher) is required.

Available resources to get more info about the solution

Sales references

Fabio Riva - Architect IBM - Fabio is the IT Architect who participated to the development of this solution. In order to get more info, please send an email to: fabio.riva@it.ibm.com

Sales references

Paola Monteferri - European Tivoli for System z Primus - In order to get more info, please send an email to:MONTEFER@it.ibm.com

Customer references:

In order to get more info, please send an email to: fabio.riva@it.ibm.com

More detailed info:

In order to get more info, please send an email to: fabio.riva@it.ibm.com