“Did You Say Mainframe? z/OS Provisioning Toolkit V1.0.3 with Matthew Webster” Transcript Nick Hi and welcome to the “Did you say Mainframe” series of podcasts. This is

where we interview technical experts on both the software and hardware side of the mainframe business. Now today I’m thrilled to say we are joined by Matthew Webster, from the CICS Development team and Matthew is here to talk to us today about the latest delivery of z/OS Provisioning Toolkit, so Matthew, thank you joining us today.

Matthew Thank you, Nick, for inviting me.

Nick So, it really doesn’t seem that long ago that we were talking about the latest z/OS PT release. Is this on some sort of cadence these days, it seems very recent.

Matthew Yes, so we released the z/OS Provisioning Toolkit V1.0.3 on the 10th of October and the last time we spoke was probably around the release in July of V1.0.2.

Nick So, sounds even like a quarterly cadence.

Matthew Yeah ever since we did our GA in January we have been on a 3-month cycle following a continuous delivery process.

Nick Really a lot has happened in that 12 months, coming up to 12-month period, hasn’t it?

Matthew Yes, so in our first release we had support for CICS and WebSphere MQ and since then we have added z/OS Connect and WebSphere Liberty along with a number of CICS specific features.

Nick So, were not just talking CICS capability, anymore are we? We are really talking platform support here?

Matthew Yes, so we focused initially on widening the support for different middleware products. But what we have done in V1.0.3 is more around being able to provision an entire environment which may comprise more than one software server.

Nick So, for some of these other subsystems that we are now supporting is it similar to the CICS set-up or is there any specialised knowledge or anything like that?

Matthew No, so the idea with z/OS PT is the process is exactly the same for each of these middleware products and so the users should not have to know the ins and outs of those products. Just using either the template samples that we provide or those that their system programmer has created.

Nick And I am guessing that most clients, most customers that you are talking to and getting feedback from has said, “yeah that’s great for CICS but actually we have other things in our environment, other subsystems” and so providing this additional support must be filling a gap?

Matthew Yeah, absolutely from the very beginning we were driven by feedback from some of our sponsored users and one of the key pieces of feedback was “yeah this is a great process for CICS but when we deploy an application it needs more than just CICS it will need MQ possibly z/OS Connect, Db2 etc. in order to provide the environment to test and develop better application.

Nick What was some of the key deliverables of this latest release, 1.0.3?

Matthew The main one was the ability to not only provision different middleware products but also to connect them together. So, one of the principle scenarios was the ability to dynamically provision CICS and then dynamically provision z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition V3 and the connect that to the previously provisioned CICS region.

Nick And do we supply the templates to assist our customers with doing this?

Matthew Yes, so we have templates for several different versions of CICS and also for z/OS Connect V2 and V3. In addition to that we’ve recognized another piece of feedback from customers that they may not necessarily want a direct provision all of their middleware so they may have an existing dB2 or an MQ Key manager also in V1.0.3 we have also provided workflows that will enable a customer to register an existing MQ manager or dB2 subsystem. So it can then be dynamically linked to a CICS region that you have provisioned.

Nick Ok, so if we have peaked the interested of our listeners here, is there other resources that perhaps they could go to like and blog post or an article that would give them more information?

Matthew Yes, the z/OS Provisioning Toolkit has an IBM Market page and also a page on DeveloperWorks and on that DeveloperWorks page we have a blog and we put a blog entry out for every time we release a new version and also, we have follow up blog posts talking about, in detail about some of the new features.

Nick If a customer listening to this or reading the blog posts thinks “Ahh yes, I’d like to download this”, where would they do that?

Matthew There are links both on the Marketplace and the DeveloperWorks page there is a direct link and you can download the latest version of the Toolkit straight away.

Nick And how much will this cost them?

Matthew Well as you know Nick, as we have said on previous podcasts the z/OS

Provisioning Toolkit is available to customers of z/OS V2.1 and 2.2 at no additional charge.

Nick Ok Matthew that is great! Is there any last things you’d like to add?

Matthew No, I think we have covered everything and what I would recommend is if you go to the DeveloperWorks page and read the latest blog post then you will find out in more detail the new capabilities.

Nick Ok that’s great, thank you very much for joining us today.

Matthew Thank you, Nick.

Nick So that about wraps it up for this podcast, for more details please go to our Devcenter https://developer.ibm.com/cics/podcasts/. Join us again for another interesting topic related to the mainframe but for now this is Nick Garrod saying thank you for listening.