Open and Trustworthy — Three Telltale Signs Zowe is Enterprise-Ready

“Open Source” and “trust” are no longer mutually exclusive

By now, you’ve heard of the Open Mainframe Project called Zowe™ — perhaps your organization has even had a chance to give it a test run, particularly now that you can download it from a trusted source. With more than 11,000 downloads, it seems the novelty and curiosity associated with the technology are more than hype and in some sense are contagious. Truth be told, we imagine what begins as excitement is quickly followed by a concern with a thought process that goes something like this: “Wow! An Open Source project for z/OS! — But wait a minute, who supports it? And why would I bet my business on an Open Source project in the first place?!?!”. Important questions, indeed. If they’ve crossed your mind and you’re ready for answers, read on.

“Open” Offers the Power of the Community
As an open source project, Zowe not only has the benefit of garnering the collective intelligence of all contributors and all of their customers, it also fosters and expands this brain power by leveraging the entire community. This is how Open Source communities work. This is how Open Source communities drive unsurpassed value into the projects they support. Evident in the approximately 5 million lines of code in more than 12,000 contributions in the form of project commits, participation in the Zowe Project has grown steadily since the Open Mainframe Project announced its creation in August 2018. And this trend has bled into mainframe ISVs anxious to extend Zowe by building Zowe-conformant plug-ins along with mainframe users anxious to give them a try. Over 35 product extensions have passed the accreditation of the Zowe Conformance Program, while the Zowe Explorer for Visual Studio Code has been downloaded over 20,000 times! Not certain these statistics indicate a willingness of Mainframe clients to consider using Zowe? Consider this one: 99% of the Fortune 500 companies — known to leverage mainframe — already use some form of Open Source!

LTS Offers Stability Mainframer’s Expect
Zowe introduced its first Long Term Support (LTS) release in March of 2020. This release designation is important and impactful. Why? Because it addresses critical Mainframe client expectations and frankly, any consumer of Open Source, with respect to software traits like a comprehensive and compliant approach to security, maintaining stability, ensuring interoperability, and providing advanced warning on both feature deprecation and community-level support termination timelines. The LTS designation is hugely significant particularly, with Open Source. It means Zowe has matured to an “Enterprise-ready”, supportable state.

Uniquely Positioned to Offer Comprehensive Support
Finally, as vendors increasingly make Zowe foundational to their product and solution offerings, they become more capable of supporting the use cases that Zowe facilitates. Broadcom’s focus on enabling the use of Open Source in Mainframe DevOps, Mainframe Modernization, and across its broader portfolio of products demonstrates a large commitment to Zowe. Combine this with Broadcom’s initial contribution of two of the three core Zowe components, their high percentage of Zowe community leaders, representation on each of the Zowe component Squads, and a continuous stream of repository commits from employees, a natural conclusion is that Broadcom is in a unique position to support Zowe. But how does this help bring confidence to your decision to adopt? We understand delving into the open-first approach for your Enterprise, regardless of the advantages, requires some reassurance that it will work as intended, all the time. And on those rare occasions when it does not, you need the reassurance that it can be supported — any time — any day — not just when the larger community can find the time to tend to your issue. To that end, Broadcom has built a commercial support offering around Zowe which provides exactly that. We call this support offering CA Brightside, and it is based on the aforementioned Zowe LTS release.

In addition to providing enterprise-grade, 24 x 7 support for the Zowe LTS release, CA Brightside offers streamlined, tested software distributions, IP legal assurance, and support for all of the extensions included in the Code4z mainframe developer code pack available at the Visual Studio Code marketplace. CA Brightside customers will have access to and support for innovations like API monitoring and API auditing capabilities developed exclusively by Broadcom. It is also important to note that all Zowe Conformant Broadcom product plug-ins include comprehensive support as part of their “parent” product license. No additional license is required.

There’s never been a better time to offer your staff freedom of choice with an open-first approach in solving your mainframe modernization challenges. With CA Brightside, leverage the power of the open community with confidence. Tap into innovations with vigor! And call us any day, anytime you need assistance. We’ve got you covered. Go ahead — bet your business on it!

For more information on Zowe, visit https://www.zowe.org

Learn about it! Read a blog: visit https://medium.com/zowe

Talk about it! Join our Slack Channel, visit: OMP Zowe Slack Channel

Questions? Comments? Send me an email: Rose.Sakach@broadcom.com