Securing the Mainframe: How BMC Software is Integrating AI and Automation

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Shunk tv. You know, I'm thrilled to have my next guest here on with us.

I've actually known her for probably longer than she wants to admit that she knows me. Um, 'cause you know, she's pretty a young woman herself. But let me introduce you to Priya Doty.

Priya is the Vice President of Solutions Marketing for B-M-C-A-M-I at BMC Software. Priya, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. It's great to have you on.

Thanks, Alan, and great to see you again on a, a lovely Friday afternoon. So good. Yes.

Yes. Well, remember by the time people see this, it may not be Friday, but Yeah. But it, we did record this on Friday.

That's right. So Prita, you know, of course we're LinkedIn followers, friends, connections, whatever. It's, I've seen you, I've seen you getting out there a little bit on the road doing a bunch of things.

Give people, you know, and I, you know, it goes arm in arm with your, with, I guess it is conference season, number one. Number two, your role is VP of Solutions Marketing. I would have you do that, but give people a sense, Priya, of, of your journey, not just in the last couple weeks, but how, how you came to be, uh, here at BMC in this role.

Yeah. Well, I, you know what, it all goes back to DevOps, Alan. So, um, I actually started my career as a developer, um, working alongside as four hundreds and then JavaScript and other things like that.

And, uh, at some point I, I morphed from being a developer to a product requirements writer, and from that to product strategy and then solutions marketing. So it was this, like this step journey. But I remember first meeting you when I started doing a lot with the DevOps community, and I remember finding you on LinkedIn and saying, wow, this guy's really active.

I need to know him. Um, so yeah, I mean, uh, my journey really did start in the development world. Uh, today.

I, like you mentioned, I'm VP Solutions marketing for BMC Amy A MI. But just taking a step back, you know, in terms of what we focus on at BMC and then diving into, uh, what I do, BMC software, I mean, many of you have probably heard of it your, your listeners have. And, uh, it's evolved over the years.

So the company today really focuses on helping customers to automate and, uh, bring to market orchestrate, whether it's data application systems, all the way from the core mainframe all the way out to the cloud. And that is really the core of what we are. We're an automation company.

Um, the piece that, uh, I cover is BMC, Amy and AMY stands for Automated Mainframe Intelligence. So the, it's kind of the best known secret in the industry that BMC supports the full stack of a mainframe software environment. And as you know, there's lots of companies out there that have mainframes running the IBMZ platform for various reasons.

And I guess, you know, what we're, what we're on a journey on at BMC is helping customers understand, um, that it's, it's optimization and transformation, but at the end of the day, it's an AI driven optimization and transformation, if that makes sense. So that, that's the journey we're on. And, uh, it's, it's been a good journey.

I've been at BMC two years and, you know, have launched the AMY assistant product, which is our agen ai gen AI framework. And it's, it's just been a lot of fun. Absolutely.

You know, you, so I, as I mentioned well before we got on camera, I just came back from CubeCon, myself, cloud native con, I forgot what one I was at before that. And of course, I'll be at reinvent and you know, we, you can't walk two feet in the tech world without tripping over AI here. Right?

I mean, it is. Yeah. It is everywhere and anywhere all at once.

Yes. And, uh, and but rightfully so, right? It is, well, it has the promise of, of changing everything, of, of disruption in so many places.

And it's funny, there might be people out here and say, it could disrupt the cloud, it could disrupt that, but nothing disrupts the mainframe. Right? Those mainframes, they're like cockroaches.

They'll be here after the nuclear holocaust. Those mainframes will still be running, you know? Oh my goodness.

We're battle tested. Right? They're, they're designed for anything Absolutely hardened to hardened, hardened as hard it is.

Right. Um, but yet even the venerable mar mainframe and the mainframe market Yeah. Is being not severely, that's not the right word, but greatly impacted by gen AI and agent ai and, and, and what this can do.

And, and it's on everyone's, it's, it's top of mind for everyone. Um, I know recently you guys did a, uh, 2025 mainframe survey about, and one of the issues, or one of the topics covered was trusting ai. Yeah.

And, and this is, this is a, this is a double-edged sword. Talk to me a little bit about that. Well, the, the thing that was, I guess, really surprising is, you know, you, you think about how much will somebody allow or be interested in an AI doing in your environment?

And so we think of it as a spectrum of trust. And we asked a number of questions around, you know, what kinds of things might you wanna do with ai? And what was surprising is how many people were open to so many things working in that, in that environment.

And I think I'm also seeing it in the client base, you know, outside of the survey a year ago, it was, Hey, we're, we're dipping our toes. We're interested, we're testing. And this year they're coming back and it's, Hey, I gotta have a POC, I gotta set this up.

I gotta do it. So they've, they've made a rapid progression. Um, and listen, they all know that nothing is gonna be perfect, right?

They're not gonna have a hundred percent accuracy, but they're willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. And I think that a lot of that has to do with the fact that they've been socialized around it with the tools. They're, we're all using, you know, every day.

And we start to see 'em, and we think, how can I do that at work and do it simpler and easier? I agree with you. I think there's a couple things there.

First of all, I think there's good old fashioned fomo, right? People who fear of missing out. Everyone else is using it and they're not.

I think secondly is, is quite frankly, we've, I don't, I've never seen anything in 30 plus years in tech have this kind of on-ramp, right? I know. And, and here's something I think that's heartening.

Your numbers and what you see in your mainframe survey are not very different with the same sort of outcome that we're seeing in other surveys. So, for instance, I recently saw a survey of all developers, not just mainframe, 90%, nine 0% are using AI one way or another. Yeah.

Which, which is probably in line similar to what you're seeing there playing, but here's the kicker, 40% don't trust it. 65, and they're still using it. 65% think it introduces instability and still 90% use it.

It's the same thing you're seeing. Yeah. We, it may not work yet, but we're still gonna use, use it.

Well try. Well, and, and I think what, to, to your point, I think part of it too is we're seeing a lot more of how do I explain what's here? How do I analyze the application?

How do I understand what the root cause is? So it's almost like, help me as advise me what's going on. And then the next step is gonna be sort of more of the automation of repetitive tasks.

And to be clear, I mean, there's a lot of automation already in every software platform, so this is just taking it to the next step. Um, but yeah, it's agreed, it's fascinating. I think the other little knit on the survey was there's a lot of younger generation in the mainframe community that's coming in, and they're much more open to the technology, and they don't have the same perceptions about mainframe, the, the, the next generation did.

So their perception is it's a blank slate. Hey, I have this thing, why can't I use AI here? So they don't see the same barriers that maybe earlier, you know, people who worked on it earlier.

See, I, I, you're right. I do think, you know, people have preconceived notions. I I do think maybe a lot of people who have been in the industry a while look to say that they're worried about their jobs with AI is, is an understatement, right?

Yeah. I think a lot of people are worried about what does it mean for their career and future. Um, nevertheless though, you know, the trains left the station.

We're all playing with it. We're all using it. And so it really, I think, becomes a question of how do we get comfortable.

Mm-hmm. How do we learn, how does AI earn our trust? Yeah.

How do we learn to trust it as, and not as a replacement, right? But as a partner, as a, yeah. As a 10 Xer, if you will, as they call it.

And you know, specifically when we talk mainframes, Bria, how that kind of playing out? Well, I mean, there's, there's multiple ways to answer that question, right? I mean, some of it is our, our product roadmap and how we're strategizing around building out the roadmap for the product.

But I won't bore you with all the gory details. Um, I think that what we're seeing is, you know, around leveraging it for particularly around development and then operations, right? And what we're seeing is it's, it's a step function.

So you start with the explain capabilities. So you start with like, explain my code, help me understand it. Uh, then the next phase is, all right, let me help, help me selectively refactor, right?

Let me help look at selectively, pull out snippets of code, look for dead code, identify places that I might want to refactor and let's go do that bit by bit. But we're not trying to do, um, you know, mass transpiration of code, right? It's, think about the ABCs.

It's, uh, you know, thinking about first understanding, analyze what you've got, think about the business logic, and then go do the conversion, right? Um, so that, that on the dev side, that's one place on the ops side, you know, it's, it's really tapping into the AI ops journey that many customers are already on, but just taking it to the next step. Okay, so now how do we get from, uh, doing AI ops, using dashboards, pulling all of our monitors into one place, looking at AI ml, but then taking that to the next step to get to how can I get better intelligence on what my root cause might be so that I'm, I'm not just, you know, stabbing around in the dark, but I can really understand what it's, and that that's what's here today.

Um, I think customers are very interested in what they call self-healing systems. And that's the other piece that we're looking at a lot right now. Absolutely.

You know, I, I think one of the, uh, one of the places where the mainframe, you know, I look kudos to IBM and the, the new Z version and all this stuff, and yeah, they've, and the whole mainframe software world, right? Not just IBM, but BMC obviously is one of the bigger, it's a small world when you look at the mainframe software providers. Yeah.

Right? There's only four or five major ones done an amazing job of on modernization, right? Today's mainframes run anything you want, basically.

Right. They're really great. I don't know if managing the mainframe has kept up with that though, and I'm wondering if that's not an area where AI can, can really make a dent, you know, and help us out.

I think so, and I mean, I think that's what we're seeing is that, you know, what the customers are saying is, first of all, they don't see the platform as not modern. They see it as a modern platform because of all the, you know, it's got, you can run GPU accelerators in there, you can run AI inferencing in there. I mean, there's lots of things you can do with it.

Um, but when it comes to optimization and transformation, that's how I like to think of it. Because most of our clients at BMC, they're looking at how can I optimize and transform this environment, just like you said. And we think of it as sort of five key, uh, we call them patterns, right?

You think about, um, re-imagining your dev workflows, you know, how can you make it better for the, for the developer, refresh it, leverage ai, uh, re-energize the operations teams. So again, leveraging ai, doing more, refactoring some of your code, um, recalibrating your resources, quite frankly, you might wanna, you know, just re rethink about, again, how are you doing data management? Should you be moving some of that data into a hybrid cloud environment?

Um, and then last, and not, but not least, as security, you've gotta continually recertify your solutions to make sure that they can hit the compliance goals you have, um, hit the security goals you have. And I think one of the biggest fallacies in the mainframe space, people have no idea how bad the insider threat vectors have gotten. Like, truly no clue how bad and how much they're exposed if they just assume that the hardware alone is gonna save them.

Right? So, um, that, that's kind of how we think of it. It's just, you know, it's, it's that mindset of how can I help you optimize and transform?

And it's not about like, doing everything at once. I mean, a lot of our clients, they get stuck in the compliance loop and they have to spend a lot of time on that every day. Um, and others are spending more time dealing with, you know, resiliency or, uh, you know, getting faster to faster to market and innovating faster.

Absolutely. Um, Bria, you know, you mentioned the security thing too. And, and you know what, it's something I've spoken about before that I want to just mention on here, is in many ways, the mainframe being as secure as it was at the, at the, at the machine level, at the, you know, platform level was its own worst enemy because it gave people this maybe false sense or heightened sense of security and allowed them maybe to take their eye off the ball or not focus on the security of the software.

Don't worry about it. That mainframe is rock solid. Right?

Right. Most secure platform out there. We don't have to worry, am I using an old package?

Have I updated my packages? Have I, you know? Yeah.

And, and that's something that bears repeating the people. Just because it's a mainframe doesn't mean security is on, on autopilot. You Absolutely.

And every customer group will go in and we'll ask them what their priorities are and they'll, and security is not at the top. And then they'll hear, you know, oh man, these are the types of insider threats that could happen. These are the kinds of ransomware situations that could happen.

And invariably they leave and the first thing on their mind is security. So, absolutely. I just, well, no, because it's a victim of its own success, right?

Yeah. We've all heard that it's the most secure platform out there, dollar for dollar. And, and so, you know, you get or the Credentials secure, right?

That's the challenge. Well, Well, exactly. Because that's the way in.

People don't break in the, the bad guys don't break in anymore. They log in. Right.

Brilliant. Brilliantly said Alan. Yeah.

Yep. And that's, that's the truth. I want to talk about another big thing in, in the mainframe world, and that is, you know, back during COVID, right?

We all heard the horror stories. I can't get your unemployment checks out 'cause that program was written in cobol. Oh yeah.

And we don't have cobol uh, uh, programmers. And thank god India still has a ton of people that training in COBOL will outsource it. But the fact of the matter is, I think one of the biggest movements in the mainframe world is a COBAL to Java conversion.

'cause hey, we'd run, it runs Java. Great. Yeah.

Is that pr, is that real? What, what's going on on that end of the, of the mainframe market? Um, I think there's a lot of different solutions out there.

And, you know, some of them are more proven, but most of them are still very nascent. Um, I think that customers are definitely, you know, they, they've, many of them have said for some time, you know, they're looking at where should an application be run, what workloads belong on what platform? And that's been going on for a long time.

So what I'm seeing is the desire is to convert, but do it in a smart way. Right? Um, and by the way, not everybody wants to go fully to Java.

Um, that requires more maintainability. It, you know, requires, it's not as backward compatible. It may not have the same level of performance.

Um, so it's not a, it's not a prescribed, It also gets you on the hamster wheel. Right now I'm on Java, I gotta upgrade every time Java does, and that's it, right? And all of those things where you could run COBAL code from 20 years ago, and it probably runs good now as it did then.

Exactly. But at the same time, I think there's clients that are saying, well, if I'm writing in Java, that gives me a lot more strategic flexibility because I can get more programmers. It's easier to find, right?

So it's, it's really for us, what we're trying to do is first of all, support Java across the platform. So that means, you know, in the dev environment, in the ops environment, and we've been on that journey for a while, and then what we've just announced in October is Cowell to Java, you know, sort of refactoring support. But again, for BMC, it's how do we help you with that A, B, C, you know, how do we help you analyze, look at the business logic, and then selectively convert.

We're not gonna, we're not gonna be your partner to come and like just do the, you know, translation of the code. Um, and I don't think that's what we recommend people do. So, Gotcha.

Um, how could our friend AI help us with this? I mean, that's what AI does is with the CO to Java conversion. It's, you know, AI starts with helping you understand the code.

It can document the code literally at the click of a button. You know, think about something that might've taken weeks before, and then it went, it comes to the conversion. It's, you know, a step by step every step of the way, uh, AI is there to help you convert the code.

So it's, it's pretty awesome, Alan, to see those gen ai, um, I guess they're not algorithms, but just the, you know, the LLMs and how they function and how they're having such an amazing impact, um, one Thing. And day by day, I mean, day by day, day by day, it gets better. And the, the cool thing with BMC is we're embedding these functionalities into the existing suite.

So if you already have the BMC Amy Dev X product, I mean, it's just, it becomes part of the suite as you upgrade and, you know, continue on your versions. Well, I, I think it goes back to what we spoke about before. This is why we're seeing the pickup.

We are, this is why we're seeing the, the usage even in spite of trust and everything else. That's Right. It's there.

Use it. You know, A another place where it excels is, is, uh, upskilling even helping people upskill themselves. Yeah.

Right. So it's sort of like knowledge expert chat, right? Yeah.

Yeah. They wanna learn how to do something. And it's funny, I so personally, I've been forcing people to do this.

Now when they ask me to do some or they ask how to do something, or they ask how they should go about doing something, what they used to Google for, I said, don't Google it, ask ai, it'll, it'll show you better. Yeah. And it really is when you go side by side.

Now, there are people, and I've written an article on this that say, ai, ai rots your brain a little, because it may almost makes it too easy. Mm-hmm. At least with Google, you had to go through the search results and click on things and, and pick out Right.

You know, the nuggets and pearls that you needed where with ai, man, it just delivers it for you. And, but when time is money and money is time, and there's a crunch on you like that too, I mean, that's a preferred method, I think. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, and listen, Google isn't perfect either. Google isn't perfectly accurate either. You know, you And getting worse every day.

I might. Yeah. Yeah.

But that's another story. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think what we're finding with the upskilling piece is we launched, uh, a knowledge expert within Amy assistant and it's just, you know, a standard chat functionality, but it's from within the product, right. And that means that if you're a newbie, you can ask it questions, but also if you're an experienced person or you just trying to remember something that happened before, you need to go look it up, uh, or you're in mid-career, it can help like any level of skill to get better and faster and, and ultimately help to onboard people faster, which is key.

And then I just go back to, I was a, so I know you're a, an ex New Yorker, like me, I'm a New Yorker, and I was on the subway, the other You just don't have the accent anymore. I do, but Oh yeah. We'll talk about it another time.

Go ahead. But, um, but I was on the subway and I saw this ad and it said, why would you use the same GPT that you use to order pizza to pick stocks? That's A good, yeah.

That makes you think, That, makes you think, right? So I think it's the same with the vision we have for the knowledge expert. It's, you know, why would you use the chat GPT generic function that's not necessarily domain trained or context aware to, to talk about, to ask questions about your specific mainframe environment, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. You could. But should you No, you could, and you might get good responses some of the time, right.

But I, I think that is the next phase of this where we move off these frontier models that are, you know, this wide and, and have the whole sum of knowledge of mankind or something in there. Right. They scraped the entire internet.

That's Right. That's right. And there's a question of how much more could they scrape?

They scraped all the data already, Right? Two more of let's call 'em SLMs. Yes.

Or more, you know, specific Right. And contained also so that they can't be poisoned, you know, by general kind of stuff. Yeah.

And they're much more domain specific. I, I think we're going to see more and more of that. That's going to become the norm, right.

Than than a a, a a one size fits all. That's right. Uh, LLM And, and listen, BMC is curating the best of, you know, we'll look at any specific situation, we'll curate the right LLM for that problem, and then we'll help the customer to train it with their own data.

That's the goal. Right. And that is, quite frankly, what I've been doing here, even with our own, we use, I wrote an article on this last week about the future of journalism and media and ai.

Oh, Cool. Yeah. You know, yeah.

We, we use it here and, and I've trained, I trained it on my style, on my voice, on what I wanna, you know, to be like, and it absolutely works. And it, it, it's in there. But here's the other thing though.

We're seeing this, like, for developers, it's inside the IDE. Yes. Right?

So literally as they're coding, the AI is correcting, suggesting helping. It's almost like an alter ego, if you will, that embedded contextual expertise, if we can call it that, is really the, I think the future, not just for software development, but for software operations management, and probably in a lot of things outside of tech too. Yeah.

But, you know, once we get to that point where it's not this frontier model of everything anywhere at once, but very specific and very deep, and you put it, you build it in like it's being built into IDs today, I, I really think you're gonna see a huge productivity kinda jump from that. And that's what even we're seeing internally. I mean, we're using our own IDE for some of our assembler developers and just for code explain.

And they're seeing productivity increases, um, on the order of 20 to 30%. Just from that. You know, Priya, this is a great discussion, but I, I feel like we, we've gone over our time here.

Let us, um, let us take a break here and I'm gonna bring you back and we're gonna continue our discussion with a part two, if that's okay. Cool. Hey, you're watching Text Drunk tv.

I'm here with Priya Dotti. We'll be right back. Check out part two.