In today’s digital economy, customers expect a wide range of services, accessible anywhere, always available, and instantly responsive. As a result, successful organizations are constantly looking for ways to quickly adapt and innovate, building solutions that connect systems across the enterprise seamlessly and securely, regardless of platform. To do so, they must navigate the challenges presented by complex infrastructures, a changing mainframe workforce, ever-increasing data volume, and constant cybersecurity threats.
The April 2025 release of enhancements to the BMC AMI portfolio empowers mainframe organizations to conquer these challenges by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), simplifying Java development on the platform, ensuring system and data resilience, and strengthening security.
The recent announcement of IBM® z17™ shows that AI is poised to play a key role in fueling innovation and growth on the platform by accelerating application modernization, delivering key insights that streamline operations and enhance the value of data, and improve productivity while enhancing security. Read on to see how this quarter’s enhancements can help your organization not only optimize the mainframe of the present but also be ready to maximize the potential of the future.
GenAI-powered intelligence
As organizations increase their utilization of generative AI (GenAI), selecting large language models (LLMs) that fit their policies, requirements, and use cases can be a challenge. BMC’s pioneering mainframe GenAI solution, BMC AMI Assistant, supports the use of multiple AI models, including bring-your-own LLMs (BYOLLMs), providing the flexibility to adapt AI strategies to specific use cases, policies and security requirements. Mainframe teams can select LLMs from a curated language model library or use their own LLMs, giving them greater control over and confidence in GenAI output.
The new BMC AMI Assistant knowledge expert, now in beta, helps enterprises preserve institutional knowledge and eliminate reliance on manual knowledge transfer by delivering precise, context-aware responses tailored to mainframe challenges. Leveraging AI agents, our new knowledge agent fuses LLM intent, user persona and skill level, the BMC AMI knowledge base, and customer enterprise knowledge into every prompt, ensuring high probable relevance.
Full development lifecycle Java support
Results of the 2024 BMC Mainframe Survey show the use of Java on the rise, with 64 percent of organizations developing new mainframe applications and 55 percent rewriting existing ones in the language. This quarter, we’ve extended support for mainframe Java workloads with the addition of automated exception handling for Java applications in BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID.
Paired with the Java performance monitoring capabilities recently introduced in BMC AMI Strobe, this enhancement empowers mainframe teams to efficiently develop, monitor and troubleshoot Java applications while maintaining system reliability and optimizing operational costs.
Operations: AI-guided issue remediation and intelligent automation
When mainframe system issues occur, operations teams expend precious time deciphering root causes and developing remediation plans. Leveraging AI agents, new GenAI-powered capabilities in BMC AMI Assistant translate root cause analysis from BMC AMI Ops Insight into plain-language guidance and actionable next steps, making expertise accessible at all skill levels and helping teams to resolve issues faster, reduce downtime, and maximize system performance. Our solution doesn’t just identify the problem—it explains it, and more importantly, recommends the next best actions to fix it. This dramatically reduces MTTR and empowers teams to act with confidence—even when tribal knowledge is no longer available.
System programmers and operations teams can now monitor, analyze, and act on network insights faster, regardless of their experience level, thanks for an integration between BMC AMI Ops Monitor for IP and BMC AMI Datastream for Ops. This integration enables real-time streaming of z/OS network activity into Splunk, Elastic, and other enterprise analytics tools.
Improving data recovery, DevOps integration, and DORA compliance
A new self-correcting recovery feature in BMC AMI Recovery for Db2 automatically adjusts recovery execution options by proactively identifying and addressing potential recovery issues. By adapting recovery processes to changing conditions, this reduces manual intervention, minimizes downtime, and enhances database resilience.
GitLab support has been extended to BMC AMI DevOps for Db2, building on existing integrations with Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions to enable seamless database pipeline integration.
To help ensure compliance with the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), BMC AMI Application Restart Control for Db2 introduces foundational capabilities in April, with full support planned for general availability in Summer 2025. These capabilities include secure configuration, function, and process controls while logging unauthorized access and transmitting ICH408I messages for anomaly tracking during auditing.
Simplified hybrid cloud storage
New Cloud Data Sets (CDS) concatenation empowers BMC AMI Cloud Data users to streamline operations, reduce errors, and improve efficiency by combining multiple data sets into a single logical workflow, while enhanced visibility enables storage teams to easily index and visualize CDS originator information with automated metadata capture and advanced filtering.
Automated certificate management, enhanced security visibility
BMC AMI Enterprise Connector for Venafi now supports subject alternative name (SAN) parameters, enabling seamless failover and multi-DNS support to ensure compliance with modern security standards while simplifying secure connections in complex environments and supporting hybrid IT integration.
BMC AMI Command Center for Security offers new easy-to-read BMC AMI Security Policy Manager dashboards that provide quick insights with the ability to drill deeper for comprehensive analysis.
Forging the future with continuous innovation
The enhancements discussed above are just a few of those included in this quarter’s release (for full details on the release, visit our What’s New in Mainframe Solutions webpage). By offering GenAI LLM flexibility, the preservation of institutional knowledge, full lifecycle Java support, increased data efficiency and compliance, streamlined hybrid cloud data storage, and automated security options, the BMC AMI suite of solutions continues to leverage new technologies to help your organization transform the mainframe to meet present demands while preparing for the future.
To learn more about this quarter’s enhancements to BMC’s mainframe and workflow orchestration portfolios, read, “Delivering Business Value Through Innovation,” by BMC Chief Technology Officer Ram Chakravarti.
