BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC), the recognized leader in Business Service Management (BSM), today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Numara Software, a leading global provider of integrated  IT management solutions for the mid-market. This strategic acquisition will further accelerate the growth of BMC’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business, as well as giving customers – from the largest enterprises to smallest businesses – access to IT management capabilities geared to their unique requirements, all from a single industry leader.  The combined BMC and Numara product portfolio represents the industry’s most comprehensive set of SaaS and on-premise IT management solutions across all business segments.

Based in Tampa, Fla., Numara currently has more than 13,000 customers worldwide for its service and asset management solutions that enable IT organizations to improve service to their end users.  Numara’s technology, employees, sales force and channel of more than 70 partners, bring with them proven capabilities and success in addressing the ease-of-use and rapid time-to-value requirements that are critical for small to mid-sized businesses. Numara’s popular and award-winning FootPrints and Track-It! products will be offered by BMC.  These products complement BMC’s existing portfolio. 

“In IT management, one size does not fit all,” said Paul Avenant, president of Enterprise Service Management (ESM), BMC.  “Now BMC can effectively serve the entire spectrum of organizations hungry for IT management with products that truly meet the specific needs of their businesses. Numara’s solutions, customer base and sales and channel partners will round out BMC’s market leadership in Business Service Management and focus on customer care and support.”

This acquisition will create a broad portfolio of IT management solutions and services with unparalleled flexibility and choice for mid-sized organizations that typically have 500 to 5,000 employees. BMC’s expanded offering will include the Numara FootPrints product for integrated service and asset management delivered on-premise; the BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution, the fastest growing IT Service Management SaaS solution; as well as BMC Network Automation as part of the BMC Bladelogic Automation Suite; BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping; and BMC End User Experience Management as part of the BMC Application Management Suite. These solutions will provide customers with increased efficiencies, cost savings and broad capabilities.  They also provide the essential capabilities of BSM, previously unavailable to organizations of this size.

“The combined strengths of BMC and Numara will dramatically reshape the IT management market,” said Dave Hansen, president and CEO, Numara Software. “Mid-sized and small business organizations will benefit from new choices and more importantly, will have more capabilities to manage IT in support of the changing needs of their business.”

BMC will now offer Numara’s widely installed Track-It! help desk and asset management solution for smaller organizations. These products complement BMC’s market-proven solutions for large enterprises.  BMC will also continue to advance its unified BSM platform, including the BMC Remedy OnDemand solution and the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite, the world’s number one service desk solution.  

The transaction, which is expected to close during BMC’s fiscal fourth quarter, is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.   Additional details of this transaction will be provided during BMC’s upcoming earnings call on Feb. 1, 2012.

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 Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, today announced several product enhancements that will help its customers overcome the business risks of the "New Normal of Mainframe" by increasing developer productivity and improving application performance management.
A Multimedia version of this release that includes photos and video clips is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/mpr/cpwr/013012.html?d=243714

The New Normal of Mainframe

Under the New Normal, the surge in mobile banking and other types of e-commerce has made mainframe applications key to connecting businesses with customers. This means IT organizations must integrate new cloud and mobile applications with legacy mainframe applications at a record pace — often in a specialized development environment — while ensuring those applications deliver superior quality and performance.

At the same time, as mainframe applications become more customer-facing, complex and thus difficult to maintain, the mainframe technology industry faces a critical skills shortage. This puts businesses at risk for costly and reputation-damaging application failures. According to a recent independent research study into mainframe use conducted by Vanson Bourne*, 71 percent of CIOs are concerned that the looming mainframe skills shortage will hurt their business. Specifically, CIOs are concerned this will result in increased application risk (58 percent), reduced productivity (58 percent) and more project overruns (53 percent).

"Mainframe usage continues to increase with the addition of new customer-facing applications — often connected to the Web and mobile devices — plus growth in existing workloads. This growth is producing sizable increases in MIPS consumption and in deployed application complexity," said Tim Grieser, Program Vice President, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. "Compuware's modernized mainframe tools can help enterprises address their mainframe skills requirements needed to develop, maintain, extend and manage the performance of these increasingly business-critical applications."

Addressing the Business Risks of the New Normal

For 35 years, Compuware Mainframe Solutions have enabled developers to efficiently support critical applications -- from analyzing code, optimizing test data and testing and debugging, to pinpointing problems, validating quality, and tuning applications and performance.

The Compuware Workbench, a modernized, open framework development environment, provides new, less-experienced developers with the leading-edge products they need to work productively and with fewer errors, mitigating the risks created by the New Normal.

Now, Compuware's Mainframe Solutions have been enhanced to include the following:

Increasing Developer Productivity

Workbench 3.1.6 now includes fast, easy access to MVS data. The Workbench now features File-AID for MVS browse and edit capabilities. This enables quick and convenient access to data and file types that are critical for large enterprise application development and testing, boosting the productivity of mainframe application developers. Key business risks addressed: low developer productivity; and controlling test data management and execution costs.

"MVS File-AID Data Editor closes the last gap in our IDE. Because it's conveniently available on the Workbench, all tasks are performed in an Eclipse environment, eliminating the need for a TSO-session for the developers. The addition of MVS File-AID on the Workbench is one of many solutions that make the Workbench such a useful tool in managing mainframe application development activities," said Frank Rautenberg, Enterprise Application Support, Generali Information Services.

Quick, effective debugging capabilities. The new Workbench also includes an enhanced Xpediter debugging capability enabling IT staffers without advanced application knowledge to get into an interactive test session with minimal effort to quickly and confidently move applications into production. Key business risks addressed: lost application knowledge; low developer productivity; and reduced efficiency moving from the problem identification phase to the solution phase.
 
Enabling enterprises to quickly resolve application faults with Abend-AID 12.2.The industry's leading mainframe application fault resolution tool further extends its diagnostic capabilities, enabling users to deliver outstanding service. New features include a COBOL PERFORM trace, consolidated displays of IMS and DB2 data to speed access to crucial information, and easier access to Abend-AID reports. Key business risks addressed: reduced time-to-market delivery; poor application quality; and missed service levels.

Enhancing Application Performance Management

Automating the ability to eliminate costly performance creep with Strobe 4.3. Strobe, the industry's premier mainframe application performance management solution, now includes the ability to automatically measure batch jobs that exceed dynamically calculated thresholds. Other new capabilities include: integration with existing monitoring tools, improved CICS transaction reporting, and new views of DB2 accounting statistics.

With iStrobe 4.3 customers can now view historical performance data from a variety of perspectives, including the ability to establish baseline performance benchmarks.In addition, Strobe can now easily initiate measurements from within Compuware's Workbench as part of the development process. Key business risks addressed: not meeting user expectations; reduced competitive advantages; and excessive CPU consumption resulting in reduced revenue.

"Mainframe applications power the top retailers, banks, insurance companies, telecommunications and manufacturing companies worldwide. At the same time, as experienced developers retire, fewer developers are acquiring the mainframe skills needed to maintain these complex applications. This puts enterprises at significant risk for financial losses," said Kris Manery, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mainframe Solutions Business Unit, Compuware. "It's never been more important to have the tools and people in place to ensure mainframe applications deliver superior quality and performance."

"Navigating the New Normal of Mainframe" Webcast

Compuware will host a Navigating the New Normal of Mainframe webcast Feb. 15 at 11 a.m. ET. During the session, Compuware experts will demonstrate how new interfaces can help both experienced and new-to-the-mainframe developers be more efficient when writing and maintaining code, optimizing test data, testing and debugging, pinpointing problems, validating quality, and tuning applications and performance. To register, visit http://tinyurl.com/7z5nprb.

*Commissioned by Compuware and conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne, the survey consisted of 520 CIOs in large enterprise organizations with over 1,000 employees. Specifically, the study included 100 CIOs each in the UK, France, Germany and the U.S. along with 30 CIOs each in Italy, Benelux, Japan and Australia.

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CA Technologies, today, announced that EL AL Israeli Airline Company has implemented CA Technologies Next-Generation Mainframe Management solution, CA Mainframe Chorus, to help IT more efficiently manage mission-critical mainframe workloads and reduce the learning curve for novice administrators.

"We must support our business environment to be competitive, but cutbacks in budget and manpower make it hard for us to successfully manage our growing processing power and cope with the intensifying complexity of our computing environment," said Arieh Berger, Operation System and Information Security Manager at EL AL. "CA Mainframe Chorus helps us to simplify management, improve the flexibility and output of our computing division, and gives us a solution that allows us to do more with less resources."

In order to help provide for high availability of critical systems and services, the IT team needed a way to improve operations and reduce the training time to get new mainframe staff up to speed. CA Mainframe Chorus delivers EL AL's Mainframe team the modern web-based capabilities and streamlined user interface it needs to help accomplish these goals.

EL AL has improved IT operations by leveraging CA Mainframe Chorus' enhanced reporting tools, efficient handling of z/OS events and more flexible automated monitoring of storage levels. It has also taken advantage of faster problem detection and trouble-shooting, simplified graphical display of complex business data, historical analysis of trends and production of comparative diagrams for problem-solving.

"EL AL, like many of our customers, is looking to deliver excellent service quality to their users in spite of daunting economic and staffing challenges," said Dayton Semerjian, general manager, Mainframe Customer Solutions Unit, CA Technologies. "CA Mainframe Chorus helps them to transition from simply managing IT to delivering business services by providing Next-Generation Mainframe Management capabilities with the innovation and flexibility they need."

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Vanguard Integrity Professionals, the experts on information security for System z®, today announced its latest security and compliance education and training initiative for information technology security professionals. Vanguard zSecurity University™ provides year-round z/OS® and RACF® security and compliance training. Vanguard zSecurity University addresses the growing need for advanced mainframe-specific security technical skills required to effectively secure System z. The training also enables compliance with complex regulatory requirements such as the Payment Card Industry-Data Security Standards, Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act, Sarbanes-Oxley Act and z/OS RACF security checklists in the Department of Homeland Security and National Institute of Standards and Technology Security Configuration National Checklist Program.

“The z/OS mainframe continues to host about 85% of an enterprise’s critical data and applications, making it the single most important host in your network,” said Steven Ringelberg, chief operating officer at Vanguard. “And while System z is perhaps the most securable platform in your network, it is not inherently secure. Vanguard zSecurity University equips practitioners with applicable knowledge and hands-on skills that can be put to immediate use to improve enterprise IT security, avoid unnecessary risks and ensure compliance.”

The university curriculum is designed to teach both new and experienced security professionals practical techniques for improving security, minimizing risk and administration errors, increasing productivity, reducing information technology costs and ensuring compliance. Courses are taught by members of the Vanguard professional services team, each with an average of more than 30 years of security implementation experience. These industry recognized experts were responsible for developing or contributing to many of today’s modern RACF security functions and security best practices for z/OS.

“Vanguard training addressed many of the unanswered questions that I have had since beginning my career on the mainframe platform,” said one trainee. “The training was very informative and the class curriculum was directly related to my job role.”

“The need for System z specific security and compliance training has increased significantly over the past few years,” said Lori Nguyen, manager of conference and training at Vanguard. “Vanguard provides flexible, on-demand security training programs that have an immediate impact. Investing in security training is the best and most cost effective way to secure your enterprise.” She continued, “If you are an IT security or compliance professional responsible for implementing, administering, supporting or auditing System z, this training is for you.”

Vanguard zSecurity University curriculum includes:

SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

•     Developing Effective RACF Administration Skills
•     Intermediate RACF Facilities
•     Advanced z/OS Security: RACF for the Enterprise

ASSURANCE, AUDIT, REPORTING AND COMPLIANCE COURSES

•     Fulfilling Compliance Requirements for z/OS Systems Using the z/OS RACF Checklists in the DHS and NIST Security Configuration National Checklist Program (NCP)
•     Automating Reporting on z/OS Systems Compliance with NCP Checklists Using Vanguard Configuration Manager
•     Reporting for the z/OS and RACF Environment

To view the Vanguard zSecurity University course list and schedule, click here. To learn more about Vanguard zSecurity University visit http://www.go2vanguard.com or call the Vanguard training team at 702-794-0014.

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Marist College and the Institute for Data Center Professionals is pleased to announce the availability of our Spring 2012 on line z/OS Certificate offerings. These high quality, low cost mainframe Certificates provide a convenient way for students to build z/OS skills. No travel is involved and students can learn at their convenience (no set "class time") led by experienced z/OS instructors. The Spring '12 offering consists of:

NEW!! DB2 Application Programming Certificate (Special Introductory Pricing)
·        Introduction to z/OS and Major Subsystems
·        DB2 Fundamentals
·        DB2 Application Programming
Assembler Language Application Programming Certificate
·        Introduction to z/OS and Major Subsystems
·        Basic Assembler Language
·        Advanced Assembler Language
z/OS Associate Certificate
·        Introduction to z/OS and Major Subsystems
·        z/OS Networking
·        z/OS Security

Classes begin February 13, 2012.  Registration is currently underway. Deadline for enrollment is February 6, 2012

Please visit: http://idcp.marist.edu/learnzos for pricing and class content.  Send any questions to learnzos@marist.edu or call: 845-575-3000 x2601

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