Johannesburg, 23 Feb 2010
CA has recently blown the common misconception that mainframes are a thing of the past out the water. Research commissioned with Forrester shows that the mainframe is still viewed as the most efficient, scalable and reliable computing platform today.
The challenge, however, remains a shortage of skilled mainframe experts - a particularly big issue in the South African market. This is the view of Gerard King, support engineer at CA Southern Africa.
"Mainframes definitely have a massive role to play in company-critical technologies," says King. "The biggest challenge, however, is that it is seen as an old technology, which means the younger ranks of engineers often don`t have the technical skill to maintain them."
In a country where there is already a general lack of ICT skills, this becomes a major issue. CASA has recently launched its CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA MSM) locally - a solution which dramatically simplifies how both novice and expert mainframe staff install and maintain CA products. An industry first, CA MSM automates and streamlines CA product installation and maintenance, and alleviates the complexities associated with these processes.
"Our core objective with CA MSM is to simplify mainframes," says King. "As IT management experts, we understand the need to remove complex processes so that organisations can focus on their core income-generating activities and so that expert skills can be deployed for more challenging tasks that advance their business initiatives."
With a generational shift occurring in mainframe staffing, CA MSM is designed to help make it much easier for the next generation of mainframe professionals to manage this critical platform. "In fact, much of CA MSM was coded in Java by CA`s next generation of mainframe developers," King adds. "CA MSM also drastically reduces the human intervention required to take a product from delivery to execution, which means it helps reduce the likelihood of errors and helps enforce best practices," he concludes.
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