On this episode of Futurum Live! From the Show Floor, The Futurum Group’s Steven Dickens talks with BMC Software’s Tomer Zelberzvig, Senior Product Manager and Shari Killion, Senior Solutions Engineer during the SHARE Conference in New Orleans. Their conversation covered hybrid cloud data protection and management for Mainframe data. It’s a great conversation you don’t want to miss.
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Transcript:
Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome. My name’s Steven Dickens, and you’re joining us here for another Futurum Live! From the Show Floor here at SHARE in New Orleans. I’m joined by Tomer and Shari. Welcome to the show.
Shari Killion: Thank you-
Tomer Zelberzvig: Thank you.
Steven Dickens: Before we get started, let’s get our listeners and viewers orientated. What do you do for BMC? Maybe, let’s just expand from there.
Shari Killion: I’m a Senior Solutions Engineer. I came over with the Model9 acquisition, so the product is now BMC AMI Cloud.
Steven Dickens: Fantastic. You, Tomer?
Tomer Zelberzvig: I’m also part of the Model9 acquisition. I do product management for AMI Cloud, so I’m in charge of all the product-oriented stuff in BMC AMI Cloud.
Steven Dickens: Fantastic. Lots going on in the cloud space. Hearing from clients I speak to and other vendors, hybrid multi-cloud data in multiple places, people thinking about cybersecurity, what are you hearing? What are those big megatrends that you are hearing, both from clients and from some of the other people that you speak to in the industry? Let’s start with you.
Shari Killion: Sure. Well, cyber resiliency is just becoming second nature. Everybody’s just talking about it now. The important part with our solution is to get that golden copy, that backup copy to a place where it’s safe and that you can recover from, so hence going to the cloud, putting it on immutable storage.
Steven Dickens: Getting that third-party copy, getting that third copy out there in case anything goes on premise, you are covered. Is that what’s driving a lot of the conversations?
Shari Killion: It is. It is driving that a lot, and it’s just making sure. Now, you have safe harbor compliancy, you have over-
Tomer Zelberzvig: DORA.
Shari Killion: … DORA over there. They’re having to meet these compliancies, and it’s an easy way to do it.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. It’s not just from a resiliency posture, it’s also from a regulatory compliance perspective. What are you hearing, Tomer? There’s maybe a European perspective or some of the other dynamics?
Tomer Zelberzvig: Yeah. You do hear a lot about DORA these days, now. A lot of customers are interested in creating another copy. It also allows them to expand the portfolio, like creating a cloud-based copy instead of an on-prem, tape-based copy. It allows them to create some tech leverage of cloud capabilities, like immutable copies, safeguarded copy of some sort that will give them the ability to recover basically anywhere with network connectivity, and that will allow them to be more resilient.
Steven Dickens: You touched on tape, there, briefly. Lots of people… We were talking about it with one of the other vendors, we were chatting, some of those regulatory compliance about the length of retaining that data. Tape’s always been an operational challenge. How are people using something like the AMI Cloud portfolio to address some of those operational challenges?
Shari Killion: Well, with tape, you have to refresh it every so often. It only lasts for so long, and those refreshes are very expensive. What you’re doing is you’re just putting it on another type of media that can be possibly broken into, or have some kind of ransomware attack, but not only that, it ends right there. The data ends its lifecycle there on tape. Part of what we do is transformation of the data as well. By putting it to the object storage, now we’re able to liberate that data and transform it on the object storage, without having to recall it back to the mainframe and do the transformation there.
Steven Dickens: Just removing a lot of that operational overhead around tape management effectively.
Shari Killion: Oh. Absolutely. Yeah.
Steven Dickens: And-
Tomer Zelberzvig: Essentially, also taking leverage of the cloud capabilities of doing transformation, instead of doing the transformation on the mainframe that will only allow you to take a subset of the data. Once you push the data outside, you’re open to doing more stuff with the data because it’s outside. Opening it up, and loading it to an analytics data lake, and that world opens up a new capabilities for mainframe data.
Steven Dickens: I was going to ask that question about AI, ML bringing extra value to that data. Not only do you need to secure it and maintain it for regulatory reasons, that’s a huge trove of data and value that you can unlock, if you get it to the cloud. Are you starting to see mainframe shops start, now that they’ve moved it to the cloud, able to get new advantage and unlock competitive advantage, now that they can do something with it in the cloud?
Tomer Zelberzvig: I think almost all of them ask about it. They want to do something with it because it’s a new capability that they didn’t have before. They used it on tape. Tape is a silo. You cannot do anything with it. It’s locked there. Maybe, it’s a good safeguarded copy that can’t be touched or tampered with, but now, with cloud, you can actually create that immutable copy, and also take that data and actually take leverage of it. This is something that almost everyone wants to do.
Shari Killion: You take the dependency off of the mainframe folks to do that transformation for you. Transformation can be time-consuming, can run for hours, can run for days. Now, you just move it over to the cloud. They can do the transformation. You don’t have to be a mainframe person to run the transformation. They get to the data when they need it.
Steven Dickens: Is that taking the load off from a four-hour rolling average or an MLC perspective-
Shari Killion: Oh. Yeah. Absolutely-
Steven Dickens: … because you’re now processing that in the cloud?
Shari Killion: Yep. Yep. Absolutely-
Steven Dickens: Fantastic. We hear a lot about the skills gap in the mainframe space, people aging out, those baby boomers starting to finally retire. How’s that impacting this whole data security and data resiliency landscape?
Shari Killion: It’s more the data management of the solutions there, and the data management solutions that are out there today have been around for 30, 40 years. These are… The people that are working with these tools today, they’ve been around for 30, 40 years. That doesn’t give much of who you’re going to hire to replace them because they haven’t been around for 30, 40 years, using these tools. We’re helping to simplify the data management. We’re eliminating the complexity of managing data on a daily basis.
Steven Dickens: That’s huge-
Tomer Zelberzvig: Essentially, providing a UI, rather than having an ISPF-based tool in order to manage all this, is something that simplifies everyday work.
Steven Dickens: That’s the barrier-to-entry to get into this. It’s a lot simpler to do these tasks, therefore, people earlier in their career can take on these tasks-
Tomer Zelberzvig: It takes minutes to understand how to do it-
Steven Dickens: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. One thing we’ve touched on, and we’ve glossed over, maybe, so I’m going to come back to it, we’ve talked about immutable copies. Obviously, that leads me into a cyber resiliency, cybersecurity conversation. We talked about DORA metrics and DORA as a regulatory framework. Tell me a little bit more about what you are seeing and what the impact is from that.
Tomer Zelberzvig: Customers wants to have the ability to create immutable copies in the cloud, in order for them to have a different strategy for recovery. Adopting cloud capabilities allow them to actually expand their portfolio of protecting their mainframe data, instead of using on-prem tape. Cloud allows them to create those immutable copies that they can take leverage of and recover from, when they need to, and essentially get that regulation off the table instead of adapting a new strategy with tape.
Steven Dickens: Fantastic. Are you hearing the same things with the clients?
Shari Killion: Oh. Absolutely. Yeah, and just the ease of recovery, now. Can you imagine if you have to go and do a recovery from a virtual tape library? It’s going to take you hours. I used to do DR, myself, so it would take you hours. Now, you just have access to it right away.
Steven Dickens: Everything in the cloud, right?
Shari Killion: Yep.
Tomer Zelberzvig: Yep.
Shari Killion: Yep.
Steven Dickens: Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you very much for joining me on the show today.
Shari Killion: Oh. Thank you.
Tomer Zelberzvig: Thank you for having us.
Steven Dickens: You’ve been watching another episode of Futurum Live! From the Show Floor here at SHARE. We’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks very much for watching.
Author Information
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
