Compuware White Papers for Mainframe Solutions

MIPS Management at Mainframe Organizations
In today’s tight, ever-changing economy, IT executives are looking for ways to cut costs while simultaneously investing in driving business needs and competitive edge. Organizations have used a number of traditional approaches to cut costs, such as reducing head count, outsourcing, consolidating data centers and replacing "Grade A" products with cheaper (and inferior) alternatives. However, each of these methods poses an element of risk—and can end up costing more money than it saves—especially when working with complex environments.

An alternate—and low-risk—approach to cutting costs is to manage your MIPS usage better. In this white paper, learn how your peers are addressing MIPS consumption within their organization.

Application Auditing: Guidelines for Investigating Internal Data Breaches
Mainframe data security has become a critical IT issue—one that businesses have thus far addressed by locking down applications to keep unauthorized outside users from accessing them. But that only begins to solve the problem.

This white paper explores the dangers posed by internal data security threats. Learn how Compuware’s Application Auditing solution can help—both by acting as a deterrent to inappropriate activities and reducing the impact if a data breach occurs.

Compuware Solutions Facilitate Data Privacy Compliance in the Application Testing Environment
Hurwitz and Associates recently prepared a customer benefit report that describes the issues surrounding data privacy requirements in the test environment and provides best practices for addressing these challenges.  The paper includes a four-phase implementation strategy that, when combined with Compuware's products, will assist companies in streamlining the process of creating and maintaining test data environments to reduce risk and comply with data privacy legislation. In addition, read how one company is simplifying the process of securing their test data while meeting legislation compliance.

Managing and Modernizing Legacy Applications
This white paper will explore how to evaluate and improve the value of legacy application portfolios, review the range of options available to modernize and better manage legacy assets, and demonstrate the value of proactive application management.

Rapid Problem Resolution for Complex WebSphere MQ Applications
If your organization is using WebSphere MQ, you know how critical it is to the business but how difficult it can be to resolve issues in this environment. You can ease the pressure of correcting issues in WebSphere MQ by adopting a structured approach that emphasizes application tools to resolve application problems. Download this white paper to learn how you can use Compuware tools to build an organized process to rapidly detect, understand and correct application problems involving WebSphere MQ.

Creating and Managing a Secure Test Data Environment
You can obtain ROI when you create a repeatable test process and run more test cases in less time. To do this, you need a realistic test data environment that satisfies the business rules of the application. Learn how you can create and manage a complete and realistic test data environment by creating baseline and test databases as well as generating data that can be used by your testers when they are performing functional/regression tests or performance/load tests.

Seizing New Opportunities to Control Software Maintenance Costs
Poor software quality is endemic and a large but hidden contributor to IT and operational costs. Improving software quality improves developer productivity by letting them concentrate on new applications, rather than finding and fixing bugs in production systems.  By focusing test efforts on the highest risk areas of an application, and then guiding developers and testers to increase test coverage of those areas, you can make the most of the test phase, delivering higher quality software more quickly.

Compuware Strobe: Raising the Bar in Performance Analysis of Java-based Enterprise Applications
Java is still essentially a development environment, and surprisingly little attention has been given to the critical aspect of being able to find and fix performance problems when they arise in the more complex production environment. In this white paper, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examines how Compuware Corporation is addressing this largely overlooked area with its Strobe® family of application performance management (APM®) tools.

Achieving Cost Targets with Application Performance Management: Save Money with Compuware Strobe
An integrated Application Performance Management solution provides the tools and supports the practices you need in order to achieve the short-term and long-term gains of well-tuned applications.

Managing Offshore Development and Maintenance Projects [PDF, 168 KB]
Any potential for offshore savings can erode quickly, unless companies assess the risk and focus on tightening project management processes first. If not, companies stand to lose time, quality, productivity or money.  Consider the fact of hidden costs. CIO Magazine illustrates the point in its September 2003 issue. Based on research from Meta Group, Gartner and Renodis, CIO Magazine sited that extra costs resulting from such factors as transition costs and productivity lags can amount to anywhere from 15.2 to 57 percent of the total price tag for the offshore services. Companies, however, can significantly minimize risks and costs associated with offshore outsourcing by implementing both sound project management processes and appropriate tools.  Learn how you can significantly minimize the risks and costs associated with offshore outsourcing.