IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it plans to acquire EZ Legacy Ltd. (EZSource), an Israel-based application discovery company, to help developers quickly and easily understand and change mainframe code based on data displayed on a dashboard and other visualizations. Today’s applications can be made up of millions of lines of code, and to update this code can take days or weeks. EZSource provides a visual dashboard to quickly and easily show developers which applications have changed to ease the process of modernizing applications, exposing APIs and more efficiently leveraging development resources. The planned acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016 subject to completion of governmental review and customary closing conditions.
With 80 percent of enterprises expected to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy by next year, IT departments are looking for new ways to reconcile the applications that reside on enterprise systems of record to digital forms of engagement such as mobile and social.1 68 percent of the world’s production IT workloads run on the mainframe. This adds up to roughly 30 billion business transactions processed by the system each day, including most major credit card and banking transactions and stock trades.
As organizations embrace a digital transformation and enter the API economy, connecting business-critical applications running on mainframes with mobile and cloud applications to better engage with customers is essential. The planned acquisition of EZSource will help clients find new ways to modernize and update applications on the system that is the backbone of the global economy. IBM’s strengths in digital transformation, APIs, hybrid cloud and enterprise DevOps are complemented by EZSource’s offerings that discover and analyze application components and interdependencies to accelerate planning and transformation with reduced disruption. IBM’s API management solutions, including z/OS Connect and IBM API Connect, coupled with EZSource’s technology, help connect services from core applications to new mobile, cloud, social and cognitive workloads.
A key step in this evolution is to understand what assets already exist in the enterprise. IBM’s current DevOps offerings, such as IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z Systems and IBM Rational Team Concert, coupled with EZSource’s application discovery technology, are designed to enable developers to evolve those legacy assets at the speed of business with reduced risk to the enterprise. EZSource alerts developers to the number of sections of code that access a particular entity, such as a database table, so they can easily check them to see if updates are needed. Without the advanced analytics in the EZSource solution, developers would need to manually check thousands or millions of lines of code in hopes that they would find the ones that need to be changed, putting all entities at greater risk of error.
“The mainframe is the backbone of today’s businesses. As clients drive their digital transformation, they are seeking the innovation and business value from new applications while leveraging their existing assets and processes,” said Ross A. Mauri, general manager, IBM z Systems. “By adding EZSource’s technology to our enterprise DevOps and API management offerings, we are making it easier and faster for developers to modernize key applications that previously were manually intensive and many times required specialized skills.”
For more than a decade, EZSource has helped clients, including major financial institutions, manufacturers, global transportation companies and software vendors safely modify applications to enable their digital transformation. As clients embrace APIs, hybrid cloud and mobility, EZSource’s technology can enable enhancements in application and skills utilization, allowing enterprises to fully optimize their IT infrastructure for the modern business era.
