In IT, change never stops. The continuous push for innovation, advancement, and customer value is what drives IT strategy. IT leaders are required to effectively and simultaneously manage various competing priorities, including application maintenance, the integration of new features, compliance with regulatory requirements, client-driven enhancements, support for new platforms and software, operational efficiency, and innovation.
At leadership’s disposal are a finite number of resources in terms of skilled staff and technical tools to facilitate the effort. And while much has been written about the promises of hybrid computing platforms, agile, DevOps, automation, and—most recently—AI, the fact remains that business expectations usually outpace IT’s ability to deliver. This is as true for the mainframes as the distributed world, as the lines between the two worlds continue to erode towards a holistic, hybrid approach.
Development challenges manifest as many and various issues, shaped no doubt the carefully managed budgets involved. But one nagging concern besets many mainframe developers—a suitable, available environment. Within mainframe operations, z/OS environments are generally highly secured assets, and their availability is managed through rigorous procedures. Furthermore, due to the diverse array of mainframe software and subsystem variations requiring support, setting up the accurately configured baseline environment presents considerable administrative complexity. In short, for a mainframe developer, getting themselves ready to code is one of the biggest hurdles.
And it isn’t their fault. Mainframe environments (LPARs) are typically supplied on request by administrative staff, outside of development. And that’s a separate activity from the supply of data, the domain of the DBA. Add to this the complexity of more than one development team collaborating on a coding task, such tasks often span team (or even organizational) boundaries. Then factor in the permutations of OS, subsystems, application and database versions for which each development task must be applied, and this creates a multi-dimensional array of environments and elements to manage. Little wonder that something as mundane as requesting a development LPAR takes as long as it often does.
The 2025 Vanson Bourne mainframe market survey revealed that 79% of mainframe teams felt that tooling was hampering the business, while 88% said “existing environments did not fully meet their delivery needs”. Worse still, in the same survey, 84% said implementing mainframe change in a shorter timeframe was very or critically important to their organization, with 8 out of 10 saying improvements were needed.
Developing a Smarter Mainframe Delivery Process
Imagine a situation whereby a mainframe development can provision their own environment, whenever they need it, for as long as they need it, correctly configured, to support a development activity.
Imagine, too, that the development environment can be replicated exactly to other members of the team to allow a collaborative effort against the same environment, or to verify the same fix works against different branches or environments.
What mainframe development teams want is the freedom, the flexibility, and functionality to develop whenever the need arises, with the ability to utilize their choice of tooling, and share environments with teammates. No DBAs, no administrators, no 3rd parties, just initiate the environment, share, and start work.
For smaller development teams, LPAR access may be a significant proportion of the overall cost of delivering change. Their need for simple, immediate, cost-effective access is crucial.
Revolutionizing Mainframe Development and Delivery
After decades of struggling with the challenge of mainframe testing bottlenecks, the flexibility and self-service required by today’s mainframe development team has finally arrived.
And the solution is elegantly simple. Instead of waiting for the mainframe environment, manage your own. An on-demand z/OS environment, replicable and scalable to the size of the testing task, available for whatever duration is required, is now part of the mainframe devops toolchain, in the form of PopUp Mainframe.
PopUp Mainframe offers mainframe software delivery teams
- Pre-configured z/OS environments including operating system, subsystems, applications and (masked) data, primed and ready for a test run
- Flexibility to replicate a preconfigured z/OS instance to ensure everyone who needs it has access to the same environment, great for collaborative development activities
- Integration with modern mainframe DevOps tools to enable teams to utilize their preferred toolchain
- The ability to save and restore entire z/OS environments to enable rapid restarts, perfect for iterative dev/test processes.
- A fully flexible environment where, using PopUp Mainframe Flex Edition, the solution is priced based only for the time it is in use, making the modern mainframe development environment extremely cost-effective.
Time to Get Real
PopUp Mainframe removes longstanding bottlenecks to accelerate service delivery to support increasingly aggressive targets. Faster mainframe development – with clients seeing a 400% increase in delivery speed – is the new reality.
Learn more about the new PopUp Mainframe Flex Edition here. www.popup-mainframe.com
