An IBM Z Data Integration Success Story

In today’s fast-paced digital world, maintaining high standards and addressing contemporary requirements is crucial for any company. One of our customers, a leading automotive manufacturer, relies on the IBM Z for its computing power and rock-solid reliability. However, they faced a growing challenge: integrating and accessing data across a complex environment.

The Challenge: Complex Data, Costly Maintenance

For decades, this company operated with an IBM Z environment supporting over 600 applications across various functions, including research and development, logistics, production, sales, and post-sales.

The data generated was as varied as the departments relying on these applications. Some departments used IBM Db2, while others relied on VSAM files or IMS databases – creating complex data governance processes and costly data pipeline maintenance.

With hundreds of applications relying on the IBM Z and the data it produced, the company found itself managing a complex web of thousands of interfaces, dependencies, and intricate database logic.

They realized they needed a more automated, streamlined way to access the data. At the same time, they were concerned about the impact of a large-scale application migration being unable to support all applications at once – which could potentially disrupt business.

The result? A phased approach was introduced: one that supported short-term modernization of the applications running on the IBM Z, while laying the foundation for a long-term data access solution.

The Solution: Unlocking IBM Z Data with the Precisely Data Integrity Suite

The company set out to find an integrated solution that supported Confluent Kafka and could expose IBM Z data efficiently – minimizing time, cost, and most importantly, service disruptions.

They chose the Precisely Data Integrity Suite’s Data Integration Service. With near real-time data synchronization, the solution ensures that databases stay in sync for reporting, analytics, and data warehousing.

This solution helped the company overcome the challenge of having a seamless integrated solution in its global IBM Z environment landscape.

By implementing data replication from the IBM Z, the team was able to build data pipelines to distributed targets, ensuring that each application use case could be supported. This process allowed end users to leverage a self-service portal – automating the creation of data pipelines and enabling teams within the organization to quickly select and validate source data with confidence.

The Results: Faster Access, Higher Satisfaction

Today, the company’s complex and mission-critical IBM Z data environment is easily accessible to applications using Confluent Kafka.

Beyond just a seamless low-impact implementation, they also needed complete confidence in the reliability and consistency in their data pipelines. With the Data Integrity Suite’s Data Integration Service, the company enhanced performance efficiency with near real-time data synchronization – achieving an average end-to-end time of 250 milliseconds per record.

Additionally, the onboarding process – fully automated through the Self-Service Portal – has seen zero reported incidents since going live. That reliability has resulted in high user satisfaction across the organization.

The journey is still in its early stages, but the company has already successfully developed a highly efficient and reliable IBM Z data environment. It continues to sustain its operational excellence and customer-centric focus – all while improving data access for teams company-wide.

To learn more and see other inspiring real-world success stories, read the eBook: Splunk & the Mainframe: Real-World Case Studies for ITOA, ITSI & SIEM