The Drive Towards Efficiency
Mainframe systems have long been the backbone of enterprise IT, supporting critical operations in banking, insurance, government, and beyond. However, traditional mainframe delivery cycles are often plagued by inefficiencies and bottlenecks (here’s a summary of our recent market survey findings), slowing down transformation and innovation.
Today, organizations are seeking faster, more flexible, and sustainable solutions to maintain competitiveness and respond to market demands.
Modernizing Mainframe Delivery: The Role of PopUp Mainframe
PopUp Mainframe empowers mainframe customers to deliver change more rapidly and cost-effectively than ever before. Leveraging cutting-edge technology, PopUp Mainframe reimagines the possibilities for mainframe teams, eliminating long-standing bottlenecks and streamlining delivery cycles.
We’ve targeted the core challenges of mainframe development, including slow deployment times, limited automation, and cumbersome environment management. By introducing innovative features and a modern DevOps tool stack, we are paving the way for agile mainframe operations.
All of which sounds great – but seeing is believing. So we set about showing the power of the PopUp Mainframe product in demo form, and designed a robust scenario and supporting script, which we road-tested at various industry presentations (SHARE, GS UK, IBM Z Day). With some positive feedback, we then decided to capture it on video, and added a voiceover track.
Key Capabilities of PopUp Mainframe
Our demo video highlights several key capabilities of the latest product release, including –
- Modern CI/CD Pipeline Support: PopUp Mainframe provides full support for contemporary mainframe CI/CD pipelines. In practical terms, this means integrating IBM tools with open-source DevOps solutions, enabling automated, reliable, and repeatable application delivery. This integration shortens release cycles and enhances code quality.
- Rapid Environment Provisioning: One of the standout capabilities is the ability to stand up and shut down virtual mainframe environments within minutes. This flexibility allows development and QA teams to quickly access the resources they need, reducing wait times and fostering a more dynamic workflow.
- Environment Snapshot and Reset: Using its FastTrack facility, PopUp Mainframe offers convenient snapshot and reset functionality for virtual mainframe instances. Teams can create point-in-time backups of their environments, facilitating rapid recovery, experimentation, and parallel development activities without risk.
- Self-Service Operations with Ansible: Managing mainframe environments is further streamlined by Ansible playbook integration. Teams gain the ability to orchestrate, automate, and manage operations with ease, promoting self-service and reducing reliance on specialized administrators.
Demonstrating Change Delivery with Next Gen Bank
To illustrate the transformative potential of these capabilities, we used as our demo scenario a fictional, but typical mainframe application: Next Gen Bank. Using this example, the user in question demonstrates a progressive, modern, and seamless workflow for delivering mainframe application code changes. The process highlights how automated pipelines, environment provisioning, and self-service management converge to boost efficiency and reliability.
In our scenario, developers initiate code changes in the Next Gen Bank application, triggering a CI/CD pipeline powered by IBM and open-source tools. The pipeline automatically builds, tests, and deploys updates to a virtual mainframe environment. If needed, teams can snapshot the environment, experiment with configurations, and reset to prior states—all within minutes. Through Ansible playbooks, operational tasks such as starting, stopping, or scaling environments become simple, empowering teams to focus on innovation.
While we had to make some choices of what to highlight (specific 3rd party tool integrations, application composition, delivery pipeline workflow), each of these are effectively plug-and-play choices our customers can make freely: PopUp Mainframe fully integrates into any z/OS configuration.
Transforming Mainframe Delivery Cycles
Harnessing the PopUp Mainframe solution fundamentally alters the mainframe delivery landscape for organizations. Traditional bottlenecks—such as slow provisioning, manual deployments, and rigid operations—give way to a streamlined, automated, and agile process. Mainframe teams experience faster release cycles, improved flexibility, and sustainable delivery practices.
By embracing modern CI/CD pipelines (consisting of both open source as well as trusted 3rd party tooling), rapid environment management, and self-service automation, organizations unlock new possibilities for mainframe development. PopUp Mainframe enables them to respond quickly to change, maintain high standards of quality, and optimize costs, all while leveraging their existing mainframe investments.
Seeing is Believing
In an era where speed, flexibility, and even sustainability are becoming vital components of mainframe strategy, PopUp Mainframe offers a comprehensive solution for modernizing application and system delivery. Through our advanced tooling and automation, mainframe teams are empowered to deliver change faster, more efficiently, and with greater confidence.
The journey from legacy bottlenecks to agile mainframe delivery is now within reach. See for yourself. To watch the video in full, you can find it here. Our video archive is here.
