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Digital Transformation Needs Mainframe DevOpsImproving User-Facing Processes Means Streamlining Core Systems

by Kurt Bittner and Robert StroudJune 20, 2016

FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERy PROFESSIONALS

FORRESTER.COM

Key TakeawaysMainframe Applications Benefit From DevOps Practices That Boost Speed And Lower RiskMainframe application delivery does not need to be inherently slow and complex. AD&D leaders have found that automating the mainframe application delivery pipeline reduces risk, cost, and complexity while improving responsiveness to changing customer needs.

Years Of Neglect Mean The Barriers May Be Higher, But They Are Not InsurmountableMainframe applications have not kept pace with technological innovations. Many have not even been recompiled to optimize their performance. Modernizing application architectures and delivery processes enables them to evolve at the speed of the business.

Improving Mainframe App Delivery Speed Is A Survive-And-Thrive ImperativeThe future of large enterprises depends on their ability to innovate their core business processes to better win, serve, and retain customers. Ultimately, it’s not about delivering old code faster; it’s about removing barriers to innovation in core products and processes.

Why Read This Report

Successful digital businesses unleash the data and business processes encoded in their mainframe-based applications. Ad hoc integrations between systems of engagement and systems of record get them started, but they soon find their ability to define innovative products and services is limited by an inability to evolve and improve their mainframe applications. Th is report describes how AD&D leaders can utilize DevOps practices to help their company free the business value trapped in mainframe apps and deliver great digital experiences to customers.

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Table Of Contents

Mainframe-Based Apps Play A Crucial Role In Digital Innovation

Mainframe DevOps Practices Speed Delivery And Reduce Risk

Recommendations

Adopt Mainframe DevOps Practices To Speed Your Digital Transition

Supplemental Material

Notes & Resources

Forrester interviewed 21 vendor and user companies, including Bank of America, BSH Home Appliances, Capital One, Cast, CA Technologies, CenturyLink, Compuware, Dish Network, Fidelity Brokerage Services, IBM, Infosys, The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company, Micro Focus, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, Nordstrom, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, The Software Revolution, SonarSource, State Farm Life Insurance Company, Travelers Indemnity Company, and UBS.

Related Research Documents

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Boost Application Delivery Speed And Quality With Agile DevOps Practices

Infrastructure As Code, The Missing Element In The I&O Agenda


Digital Transformation Needs Mainframe DevOpsImproving User-Facing Processes Means Streamlining Core Systems

by Kurt Bittner and Robert Stroudwith Christopher Mines, Taylor Turrisi, and Rachel Birrell

June 20, 2016

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Digital Transformation Needs Mainframe DevOpsJune 20, 2016

© 2016 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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Improving User-Facing Processes Means Streamlining Core Systems

“If mainframe applications disappeared tomorrow, planes couldn’t fl y, people wouldn’t get paid, and the economy would come to a halt.”

Mainframe-Based Apps Play A Crucial Role In Digital Innovation

Many companies speak of their mainframe-based applications as assets, but they are more often liabilities that impede their ability to innovate. Those old applications embody calcifi ed processes that prevent companies from responding to market opportunities with new products and services. New products driven by new insights from data enable customer-obsessed organizations to delight customers and drive better business results.

“People think that we got big by putting big stores in small towns, when really we got big by replacing inventory with information.” (Sam Walton, founder of Walmart)1

Rumors Of The Demise Of The Mainframe Are Much Exaggerated

Mainframe systems of record are the beating heart of most large businesses. The mainframe is essential to 92 of the top 100 banks worldwide, 23 of the top 25 US retailers, all 10 of the world’s 10 largest insurers, and 23 of the world’s 25 largest airlines.2 Since PCs emerged in the early 1980s, pundits have been predicting the end of the mainframe, yet while PCs and now mobile and cloud platforms have enabled new kinds of applications unimagined a generation ago, mainframes still run the core processes of most organizations.

“If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn’t be able to upload pictures of our vacation. If mainframe applications disappeared, planes couldn’t fl y, people wouldn’t get paid, and the economy would come to a halt.” (Senior executive, Fortune 50 company)

And AD&D organizations still spend a signifi cant amount of developer resources supporting and enhancing mainframe applications (see Figure 1).3

Organizations Must Modernize Mainframe Apps To Offer New Products And Services

The world has changed since most of those mainframe applications were written. They embody processes frozen in time that lack the fl exibility that today’s businesses need to create new products and services that win new customers and retain existing ones. Mobile and cloud applications garner the greatest attention, but nearly every aspect of what they do depends on data and processes that are locked in mainframe apps. A seemingly simple mobile insurance application is actually just the gateway to a complex set of applications that must work seamlessly with the mobile application and with each other to provide customers and prospects with great experiences (see Figure 2).

AD&D leaders have to do more than just wrap services around these applications; they need to modernize their mainframe applications, too.

For ApplicAtion Development & Delivery proFessionAls


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“Our mainframe applications define what products we can offer. They drive all of our core business processes. They define how we invoice customers and recognize revenue. Offering new products and services requires us to make a complex, coordinated set of changes across many applications. Inability to do this quickly prevents us from being able to respond to changes in the market. It impedes our ability to innovate.” (Senior executive, telecommunications company)

FIGURE 1 Mainframe Development Is Alive And Well

Operating system containers 19%

Custom applications that use NoSQL databases 22%

Internet of things (IoT) 23%

Custom applications that use Node.js forserver-side JavaScript

24%

Mainframe or terminal applications

25%

Big data 25%

Quality assurance or testing tools

25%

Embedded systems

27%Rich internet applications

27%

Rich-client and/or client/server apps 27%

Business intelligence, reporting, dashboards 29%

Content/collaboration sites/portals 30%

Custom applications that use application servers 35%

Cloud computing/elastic applications 35%

Mobile or mobile web apps 40%

Custom applications that use SQL databases 54%

Websites or web applications 58%

“Which of the following types of development technologies have you workedwith in the past 24 months?”(multiple responses accepted)

Base: 1,867 developers

Source: Forrester’s Global Business Technographics® Developer Survey, 2016




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FIGURE 2 Mobile And Cloud Insurance Applications Depend On Mainframe Application Services

Fear Of The Unknown And Unwillingness To Change Holds Organizations Back

Business leaders often view their company’s mainframe applications as black boxes filled with impenetrable code written so long ago that few, if any, can still maintain it, let alone streamline it. AD&D leaders live in realistic fear that if they try to change the applications, they might never run again. Balanced against this is a growing reality that upstart competitors don’t have the same constraints — and impatient customers don’t care how hard it is to change. AD&D teams face a variety of challenges in delivering mainframe application improvements at digital business speed:

› Mainframe developers nearing retirement can be hostile to change. The “we’ve always done it this way” habit is hard to break. While older developers may be comfortable using ISPF “green screen” editors and see no reason to change, they are ignoring the productivity and quality gains

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Systems of record

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of modern IDEs in fi nding defects earlier and in debugging code once defects are found.4 Modern tools are also essential to attracting younger developers to work on legacy code; the old tools simply need to go.

“We tried to encourage voluntary adoption of the new tools, but some older developers who liked their old familiar tools would never change. Finally, the only way we got them to switch was to turn off ISPF entirely. It wasn’t ideal, but it was our only choice.” (Manager, developer tools, large insurance company)

› Organizations fund application modernization only in a crisis. Reliability is both the blessing and the curse of mainframe applications; they are so reliable that it is easy to forget about them. Organizations willing to spend lavishly for improvements to customer-facing applications vigorously resist spending to proactively modernize legacy applications. The result is that a mountain of technical debt has piled up over the years and decades since these applications were written.

“Management says ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fi x it.’ But these applications are broken; they just can’t see the cracks. With a building or a bridge, people understand that preventative maintenance is essential, but because software has no visible signs of decay until it fails, it’s easy to ignore.” (Enterprise architect, fi nancial institution)

› AD&D teams fear insuffi cient mainframe app documentation, making change risky. The greatest problem AD&D organizations face is not actually a lack of application documentation but a lack of suffi cient and reliable regression tests. Not knowing whether a change is good or potentially harmful keeps AD&D teams from making it. When their only option is extensive manual testing, they hold off changes for as long as possible. Preventing change is not the solution; better and more complete testing is.

› Mainframe applications lack modularity, making even small changes risky. Modern techniques like SOA and API-centric programming models enable code to be changed without debilitating side effects.5 Older applications often lack this functional isolation, and years of accumulated quick-and-dirty changes don’t help. Compounding the problem are shared databases that increase inter-application dependencies and risk.

› Mainframe app development/release processes are slow, manual, and error-prone. It’s a vicious cycle: App developers using antiquated tools, working on unfamiliar applications, and unable to test adequately release infrequently. Instead of releases being simple one-change affairs, they are complex bundles of lots of changes. And as releases are infrequent, ops never takes the time to automate them, so every release is a risky one-off special case. The very behavior of tech organizations attempting to reduce risk actually creates more risk.

“Management says ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fi x it.’ But these applications are broken; they just can’t see the cracks.”




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Mainframe DevOps Practices Speed Delivery And Reduce Risk

DevOps practices are well proven in distributed applications, but most AD&D organizations have been slow to realize that the same practices work just as well, when applied correctly, on mainframe applications. As leading organizations have reduced their bottlenecks in other parts of their application portfolios, they have discovered how to adapt what they learn to modernizing their mainframe application delivery approach. In doing so, they have learned that there is really no such thing as “bimodal IT”; while every part of their application portfolio has different challenges and constraints, they can deliver all types of applications faster and with higher quality (see Figure 3).6

“There is no consequential difference between mainframe applications and distributed applications; the same techniques, like continuous integration, test automation, and automated releasing, can be applied.” (Application delivery manager, large financial organization)

FIGURE 3 DevOps Technologies And Their Impact On Mainframe Application Delivery

Technology Capability enabled Impact

IDEs for enterpriseapplication languages

Use modern development practices,including syntax completion, codechecking, and integrated debugging

Greater developer productivity, higher-quality code, and larger resource pool

Virtualized z/OSdevelopment and testenvironments

Obtain fresh z/OS test environmentswithout waiting and without usingmainframe resources

Higher test coverage at signi�cantlylower cost; higher-quality test results byeliminating shared test environments

Unit test automation forenterprise applications

Test code modules as they aredeveloped or changed to providedevelopers with earlier feedback

Greater developer productivity,higher-quality code

Service virtualization Simulate production systems andservices in test environments

Reduced cost and time to provisiontest environments; improved paralleldevelopment of services

Continuous integration Build, integrate, and test code as soonas it is delivered to a source repository

Greater developer productivity,higher-quality code

Static code analysis tools Analyze the quality of delivered code Greater developer productivity,higher-quality code

Release automation Reduce or eliminate manual effortwhen moving software betweenenvironments

Reduced cost, improved reliability




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Automated Application Discovery Tools Remove The Fear From Modernization

AD&D leaders have legitimate fears about modifying applications about which they know little. Combinations of code analysis tools and services help them better understand the structure of their applications, letting them make informed changes with greatly increased confi dence. The various approaches to this have different advantages and disadvantages:

› Service-based approaches help AD&D organizations quickly eliminate technical debt. Offerings such as those from Infosys and The Software Revolution use analytic tools plus expertise to help AD&D teams make sense of the mess and rapidly modernize it. Mainframe applications are complex; while tools provide insight, human judgment is often needed to make the right call about where and how to restructure and modernize. These services make the most sense for organizations undertaking signifi cant restructuring, replatforming, or rewriting of specifi c mainframe applications.

› Tools-only approaches favor a gradual self-serve approach. For those AD&D organizations keen to do their own analysis, tools like Cast, Compuware’s Topaz, and IBM’s Rational Asset Analyzer provide insights into application code that increase understanding and reduce the risk of change. These tools help them understand the structure of the code and identify opportunities for improvement.

› Static code analysis helps developers improve the quality of their code. Integrating static analysis, using tools like RogueWave’s Klocwork and SonarQube, into precommit processes helps developers correct modularity and code quality problems before they affect the main code base. Developers tend to reject static analysis when it is used to judge or evaluate them or when the rules are poorly defi ned and produce too many warnings on noncritical errors.

“To get the best results, our developer community owns the static analysis rules. They are in the best position to defi ne the coding issues they want to address. Letting them own the rules gives them ownership and increases acceptance. We leverage community to accelerate acceptance.” (Application delivery manager, large fi nancial organization)

› Dynamic analysis and analytics helps pinpoint operational issues. Instrumenting and monitoring mainframe applications as well as moving production monitoring tools and practices into testing environments also help developers reduce the risk of changing code. Identifying and resolving issues earlier reduces the chance that changes will lead to problems in production; when they do occur, you can fi nd and resolve the issues faster. Tools such as IBM Application Delivery Intelligence and Compuware Strobe are being integrated with widely used DevOps tools from companies like AppDynamics, Atlassian, Jenkins, SonarSource, and Splunk to provide greater insight across the life cycle.7

“To get the best results, our developer community owns the static analysis rules. They are in the best position to defi ne the coding issues they want to address.”




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Modern IDEs Make Mainframe Development Feel Familiar To Modern App Developers

Antiquated coding tools like ISPF present significant barriers to getting younger developers to work on mainframe application code. Familiar tools like IDEs with their integrated debuggers, syntax-directed editors, and familiar interfaces make picking up COBOL or PL/1 relatively easy tasks. Tools like Compuware’s Topaz Workbench, IBM Rational Developer for z Systems, and Micro Focus Enterprise Developer eliminate the need to learn old platform-specific tools and provide rich developer experiences that bring modern practices to bear on old code.

“Having a rich IDE for our older COBOL applications has made our developers significantly more effective. A better COBOL editing feature has improved developer efficiency by finding code syntax errors at their source, without compilation.” (Application development manager, financial services company)

The benefits of IDE-based tools extend beyond developer familiarity:

› Faster feedback and faster debugging make developers more productive. They are able to find and fix problems faster while the code is still fresh in their minds, rather than weeks or months later when they have to spend time reconstructing what they were thinking when they wrote it.

› Simpler and less costly functional testing means problems are caught earlier. Mainframe MIPS are expensive, and it is hard for developers and testers to get clean test environments when they need them. Some organizations share test environments between application teams, but this can lead to scheduling conflicts and poor test results caused when one application’s tests “dirty” the environment. Modern mainframe development tools can simulate the mainframe environment using commodity hardware, lowering cost to the point where teams can do complete functional testing without using mainframe resources.8

› Modern tools make migrating code to other platforms easier. Having the code in a more familiar environment, and having better visibility into the structure of the code, gives developers new options for moving the code to other platforms. A large insurer is gradually moving code once implemented in COBOL to cloud-based infrastructure. Modern tools open up other options, too: Micro Focus Visual COBOL provides options to compile COBOL to Java byte code, as well as deploying compiled code to .NET, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon AWS instead of z/OS.

› Continuous integration lifts code quality by enabling earlier feedback. Just as it does for distributed systems, continuous integration gives developers earlier feedback that helps them find and fix problems earlier. Precommit checks prevent code errors from breaking integrated builds; static code analysis spots errors earlier; and frequent integration prevents hidden code problems from piling up, only to be discovered late in the release cycle. Improving application performance can be as simple as recompiling old application code using more modern compiler technology that better optimizes execution for more modern hardware.9




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Infrastructure As Code Enables Earlier And More Frequent Testing

Standardizing environment configurations enables developer organizations to deliver applications faster and with greater success, achieving repeatable, scalable change while reducing errors. Doing so requires them to develop models of production configurations that they then treat as code and store in source repositories with automated version control. In this way, they can automatically deliver test environments that emulate production environments, leading to significant benefits.10

› Simulated local mainframe environments make testing meaningful and inexpensive. AD&D teams cite the cost of mainframe environments as a reason not to test more frequently. Configuring mainframe environments is costly, and MIPS are expensive. As a result, they share environments between application teams. The resulting scheduling and sharing complexity means teams do not test enough, exposing the organization to costly failures in production or slow delivery speed. Having local environments for functional testing reduces cost and eliminates sharing complexity, enabling teams to test more and earlier.

› Improved mainframe environment virtualization improves scalability and load testing. New deployment options, including running modernized services under Linux on IBM z Systems and using CICS multiregion capabilities to support blue-green environments or perform A/B testing, help AD&D organizations improve their flexibility and responsiveness.11 These options allow them to more effectively test applications in production, as well as helping improve applications’ scalability and performance.

› Infrastructure as code works equally well in the mainframe environment. Treating job control language (JCL) like code and versioning it in a source code repository helps ops professionals control change and audit environment configuration changes. More advanced tools from companies like Chef Software, IBM, and Puppet provide the same level of automated environment management to the mainframe that AD&D organizations use in distributed environments, improving operational excellence and reducing variability.

› An incremental approach improves modularity and testing. Large-scale application rewrites are disruptive, impractical, and prohibitively expensive. Many AD&D teams have had bad experiences with application rewrites that cost a lot of money and went nowhere. A large financial organization faced with platform obsolescence when a vendor went out of business first tried to rewrite critical applications in Java before resorting to porting the COBOL code to z/OS to achieve the scalability it needed to meet the demands of its business.

Its experience is instructive: It chose to modularize when it needed instead to implement new functionality. When the bank did so, it exposed APIs and implemented unit tests for the module and regression tests for the new capability; it then ran these as part of every build using an automated CI process. The bank put it this way: “Rather than ‘replumbing’ the entire application at once, we gradually improved it by fixing only the water leaks.”12




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Modern Development Practices Help Modernize Mainframe Applications

Developers play a large role in simplifying and streamlining mainframe applications. The same practices that help them deliver high-quality distributed applications help them improve mainframe application quality, including:

› Applying modular coding and architecture practices. Refactoring mainframe applications into smaller independent components with managed APIs helps organizations improve the speed at which they deliver those applications by reducing dependencies and reducing risk. Reducing dependencies to APIs reduces risk, enables test automation, and lets teams work with greater independence.

› Increasing test automation as part of continuous integration and delivery practices. As organizations break down monolithic application code into modular components and services, they are able to utilize continuous integration and delivery automation to provide developers with earlier feedback on code quality. Doing so helps developers improve the quality of their code by fi nding defects earlier. The distributed systems world has widely adopted these practices, but they apply equally well in the mainframe world — but only for those parts of the applications that have been componentized.

› Maturing code with trunk-based source code management. To take advantage of continuous integration and continuous delivery practices, AD&D organizations must adopt trunk-based development practices. Developers work on their own private branches for small intervals but deliver changes frequently to make sure their code is not diverging from the rest of the code base. While mainframe source management tools can support this, organizations are increasingly using popular distributed application development tools like Git and Jenkins to manage this process.

Release Automation Reduces Complexity And Risk

Fear of changing complex mainframe applications, exacerbated by environment complexity and business criticality, has led organizations to leave their release processes largely untouched for decades. These largely manual or only semi-automated release practices are slow and remain vulnerable to human error.13 Vendors, including CA Technologies, Compuware, Electric Cloud, IBM, Micro Focus, and XebiaLabs, have extended their products to provide the same benefi ts for mainframe applications that are available for distributed applications, allowing organizations to:

› Reduce application deployment time and effort signifi cantly. Competitive pressures compel AD&D teams to release more frequently, but their old manual processes are not reliable and

Refactoring mainframe applications into smaller independent components with managed APIs helps organizations improve the speed at which they deliver.




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repeatable enough to keep pace. Automating releases enables teams to standardize steps, reduce the time they spend releasing software, and release to the mainframe more frequently.

› Release software more frequently without increasing risk. Manual releases are risky, and mistakes are much more expensive than for distributed systems. Standardizing release automation and using it throughout the continuous delivery and testing process lets organizations prove software quality and automated release processes before they release into production. Modularizing applications also reduces risk by reducing application complexity, as does reducing the scope of releases. Traditional mainframe releases are scary affairs, but modern DevOps practices largely eliminate the risk of change.

› Improve security by reducing variability and increasing speed. Inconsistent environment confi gurations and unsecure coding practices leave organizations vulnerable to attack. Using DevOps practices helps organizations standardize on secure environment confi gurations and control subsequent change. Automated delivery pipeline practices also help organizations respond to attacks quickly without introducing new vulnerabilities. Traditional mainframe practices prevent change, but their reliance on manual processes introduces the very inconsistencies that they need to eliminate — and traditional mainframe release practices impede rapid response when attacks occur.

Recommendations

Adopt Mainframe DevOps Practices To Speed your Digital Transition

Mainframe applications must not prevent organizations from reaching their digital transformation goals. The same modern DevOps practices that help AD&D organizations deliver mobile and cloud applications faster will help them deliver mainframe applications faster, too. To start realizing these benefi ts, AD&D leaders should take the following steps:

› Only modernize mainframe applications that are essential to digital experience. Most organizations have vast portfolios of mainframe applications; you can’t modernize them all at once, nor do you need to. Focus on the applications that provide information critical to customer experiences. These applications are the ones that provide essential data to customer journeys, that defi ne and manage the products customers buy, or that manage the processes that guide the customer journey.

› Fund mainframe app improvements through digital initiatives. Organizations struggle to fund modernization for modernization’s sake, but they usually have plenty of money for customer-facing

Using DevOps practices helps organizations standardize on secure environment confi gurations and control subsequent change.




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initiatives that create new revenue opportunities. Clearly delineate how improving mainframe application delivery is essential to the success of digital initiatives, and build funding into the digital initiative budget to make the necessary improvements.

› Use modern tools to attract new developers to mainframe development. Forcing developers to use antiquated tools and processes that only apply to mainframe development turns new developers off. Giving them modern and familiar tools makes mainframe development just another technology to master and reduces the number of things that they need to learn, so they can be productive much faster.

› Start from the premise that mainframe application delivery is not different. While languages are different, developers are generally multilingual and adopt new languages all the time. The fundamental processes are exactly the same, as are the benefits of automation and standardization. Improve your mainframe application delivery speed, just as you have improved your distributed application delivery speed, by using automation to speed, simplify, and standardize the process.

› Prepare for a container-centric future. The mainframe is not going away, but the way that you use it will change. Containers and microservices are coming to every platform, including the mainframe.14 Gradually breaking large monolithic applications into smaller services will help you transition to a containerized future that promises faster application delivery, greater scalability, and better manageability.

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Supplemental Material

Survey Methodology

Forrester’s Business Technographics® Global Developer Survey, 2015 was fielded to 1,867 developers located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.

Forrester’s Business Technographics provides demand-side insight into the priorities, investments, and customer journeys of business and technology decision-makers and the workforce across the globe. Forrester collects data insights from qualified respondents in 10 countries spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Business Technographics uses only superior data sources and advanced data-cleaning techniques to ensure the highest data quality.

Companies Interviewed For This Report

Bank of America

BSH Home Appliances

Capital One

Cast

CA Technologies

CenturyLink

Compuware

Dish Network

Fidelity Brokerage Services

IBM

Infosys

The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company

Micro Focus

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company

Nordstrom

Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company

The Software Revolution

SonarSource

State Farm Life Insurance Company

Travelers Indemnity Company

UBS

Endnotes1 Source: Rich Jackson, “IBM Edge2015: Preparing for Cyber Mondays,” youTube video, May 23, 2015 (https://www.

youtube.com/watch?v=zncDpVr6b2o).

2 Source: Rosalind Radcliffe, “Mobile to Mainframe DevOps for Dummies”, IBM, 2015, pp. 09-10 (https://www-01.ibm.com/marketing/iwm/dre/signup?source=ibm-cloud-weborganic&S_PKG=ov38219).

3 Source: Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Developer Survey, 2016.

4 ISPF: interactive system productivity facility; IDE: integration development environment.

5 SOA: service-oriented architecture; API: application programming interface.




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6 For more information, see the “Forget Two-Speed IT; DevOps Enables Faster Delivery Across The Board” Forrester report and see the “The False Promise Of Bimodal IT” Forrester report.

7 For more on application performance monitoring, a key source of application analytics insights, see the “Vendor Landscape: Application Performance Management, Including Mobile APM, Q2 2016” Forrester report.

8 For a deeper discussion of functional testing and related tools covering a variety of platforms, see the “The Forrester Wave™: Modern Application Functional Test Automation Tools, Q2 2015” Forrester report.

9 For more information about modern application delivery practices and how to adopt them, see the “Boost Application Delivery Speed And Quality With Agile DevOps Practices” Forrester report.

10 For more information about infrastructure as code, see the “Infrastructure As Code, The Missing Element In The I&O Agenda” Forrester report.

11 CICS: customer information control system.

12 For more on this topic, see the “Application Modernization, Service By Microservice” Forrester report.

13 For more information about the benefits and leading vendors in this space, see the “The Forrester Wave™: Application Release Automation, Q2 2015” Forrester report.

14 For more information about containers and their impact on digital transformation, see the “Brief: Why The CIO Must Care About Containers” Forrester report.
















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