Top 3 reasons why NOW is the best time to update your Gen™ installation
Many Broadcom Mainframe Software products, including Gen, have transitioned to a strategy of continuous delivery of enhancements and defect fixes. These smaller deliverables equate to lower risk changes, smaller testing cycles, easier adoption of changes, and continuous value-adds for your business. Of course, that assumes you are applying updates continuously as well. Staying current on your software updates is beneficial, ensuring you will be supported by the vendor and have the most secure code base. But what if you have fallen behind? When is the right time to catch up, and keep up?
Here are top 3 reasons why NOW is the best time to update your Gen installation.
#1 — NOW is the easiest time to catch up! These Gen deliverables let you catch up so you can easily keep up with future smaller published PTFs:
- For your Gen distributed systems: The new Gen 8.6.3 Consolidation makes it easy to apply three years of enhancements and defect fixes to your Gen Studio, CSE, Generators, Toolset, Build Tool, and Runtimes.
- For your Gen mainframe systems: The new PAXfile for Gen 8.6 Level 2111 on z/OS leaps you from the v8.5 to v8.6, plus six years worth of enhancements and defect fixes to your Host Encyclopedia, Implementation Toolset, and Runtimes.
#2 — Technical currency increases security! Broadcom is dedicated to securing your Gen installation and Gen generated applications. Here’s how:
- Broadcom has adopted a rigorous security maintenance strategy, enabling Gen to continuously deliver security maintenance, as well as respond promptly to critical security advisories, like Log4j. These security advisories are communicated to customers through the Broadcom Security Advisories — Mainframe Software support site.
- To simplify your maintenance, Gen has shifted from statically linked components to dynamic linking, allowing future version upgrades to be more seamless. Learn more in these announcements: Updates to Client Manager and Runtimes and Updates to GUI Runtime
#3 — Broadcom is investing in Gen! This means you have valuable enhancements to take advantage of, like:
- Consuming REST APIs for your CICS and Java applications (announced here) with native support for security schemes and improved UX (announced here)
- .NET support of secure TLS/SSL communications (announced here)
- SYSVIEW Product PTF Analysis for Gen 8.6 on z/OS (announced here)
- ECI v2 for Gen C clients (announced here) and Java clients (announced here)
Be ready for more enhancements coming soon! Check out the latest Gen Roadmap Replay to learn more.
It’s always easier to keep up than to catch up when you’ve fallen behind on your maintenance. With the availability of Gen’s 8.6.3 Consolidation and PAXfile for Gen 8.6 Level 2111 on z/OS, now is the perfect time to get current on your maintenance. Then you can keep up with small and easily testable enhancements and defect fixes. With Broadcom’s investments in Gen, you also have an easy business case: increased security and access to loads of new features that will amplify the value in your Gen applications. NOW is the best time to update your Gen installation.
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