BMC and CA update mainframe systems management tools

BMC acquires MQSoftware
This week, BMC software acquired message queuing software firm, MQSoftware. BMC is touting the acquisition as a boon for mainframe shops that need to manage the middleware for applications that span both distributed and mainframe platforms.

For certain kinds of big applications, message queuing software is a necessary glue for distributed applications because sometimes servers are down or systems are just running slowly, and you don’t want a transaction to stall just because a backend system is not performing well. So instead of hard-coding the transactions pieces to not continue unless each stage of the transaction is completed, you carve up the transaction into messages and then queue them up on different parts of the application’s servers, explained Timothy Prickett Morgan in his writeup of the BMC-MQSoftware news.

CA adds Eclipse support to CICS application testing
In other mainframe systems management news, CA added a new GUI based on Eclipse for its testing and debugging tools, CA InterTest Batch and CA InterTest for CICS. CA said this new GUI will make it easier for novice mainframe staff to execute core testing, and debugging tasks. CA also released a new version of CA SymDump for CICS, its advanced abend analysis solution.