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Rocket Software - Meeting Customers Where They Are On Their Mainframe Journey
DevEx focus; AI for COBOL comprehension; Git integration; compliance automation; unified observability across hybrid IT landscapes.
24/11/2025
Key Highlights:
The announcement centers on enhancing Developer Experience (DevEx) for IBM Z and IBM i platforms using AI and automation.
● New tools are designed to integrate core systems seamlessly with modern, cross-platform toolchains like Git and VS Code.
● Key features include AI-powered code explanation for heritage languages like COBOL to help developers understand complex logic.
● The portfolio aims to close the persistent IT skills gap by making core systems more accessible to next-generation developers.
● Visibility and compliance are strengthened through unified observability metrics and policy enforcement via automation.
The News
Rocket Software, a leader in modernization and cross-platform DevOps, announced a new generation of innovations focused on enhancing the developer experience across mission-critical systems, notably IBM Z and IBM i. This evolution leverages artificial intelligence and advanced automation to improve agility and address the growing IT skills gap in core systems environments. The solutions aim to deliver faster, higher-quality software releases by enabling deeper integration with modern tools like Git and Visual Studio Code. This move positions Rocket as a key partner for organizations pursuing modernization without total re-platforming. Find out more by clicking here to read the press release.
Analyst Take
When I look at the enterprise technology landscape today, the pressure to modernize mission-critical systems is a constant, ambient force. Whether it's virtualized environments moving to containers, or a COBOL application looking to migrate to Java then tensions are largely the same.
For large organizations, the ability to rapidly iterate and deploy applications on core platforms like IBM Z and IBM i is no longer a luxury; it is table stakes for competitive survival. Rocket Software’s latest announcement regarding the next evolution of its DevOps portfolio is a direct, practical response to this reality, framing its entire strategy around Developer Experience, or DevEx. I see this as an astute move, recognizing that the primary bottleneck in mainframe modernization is less about the technology itself and more about the human capital required to engage with it.
The central challenge in the core systems world remains the IT skills gap. As seasoned mainframe professionals retire, the complex logic written in languages like COBOL and PL/I becomes a kind of organizational technical debt, accessible only to a shrinking pool of experts. Rocket is architected to address this specific pain point by infusing AI and modern tooling into the environment where this critical work happens. The goal is to lower the barrier to entry for developers who are native to modern languages and distributed systems, making the mainframe feel less like an artifact and more like just another node in a cross-platform DevOps toolchain.
What was Announced
The innovations detailed in this announcement are highly specific and technically focused on enabling modern workflows within the constraints of core systems. A key enhancement is the comprehensive CI/CD integration across the entire DevOps suite, designed to automate testing, release, and deployment management, ensuring governance is maintained throughout the process. This includes LLM API integration to inject generative AI capabilities into the workflow, alongside Git-integrated source code change management, which allows teams to use modern distributed version control methods natively for code residing on the IBM Z and IBM i platforms.
Crucially, the new tooling aims to deliver AI-powered code explanation specifically targeting complex heritage languages like COBOL. This functionality is intended to allow junior or non-specialist developers to quickly understand the embedded business logic, dependencies, and data flows within older applications, drastically reducing the onboarding time required. For quality assurance, the portfolio includes AI-driven anomaly detection and automated testing capabilities, which proactively identify potential failures and generate test-ready environments to accelerate deployment cycles. Enhanced visibility is provided through unified metrics and event data streaming, enabling AI driven health monitoring to deliver real-time, end-to-end observability across the hybrid platform architecture. Furthermore, the solutions aim to deliver policy enforcement via automation to minimize audit risk and enforce compliance standards, such as Separation of Duties directly within the development pipeline.
This emphasis on AI and integration highlights a shift away from proprietary, green-screen methodologies toward open standards. Allowing developers to work in familiar Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio Code and Eclipse, while orchestrating change management via Git, removes a significant psychological and technical
hurdle. The platform engineering movement is strongly influencing this strategy. Developers want a seamless experience. They want a paved path for software delivery. By making the core systems transparently accessible through tools the distributed world uses, Rocket aims to position these platforms as fully participating members of the enterprise's broader hybrid cloud strategy, rather than isolated silos. This is where the competition is fierce, and the ability to integrate effortlessly is paramount.
The strategic importance of this AI-driven approach cannot be overstated. Our research into 2025 trends confirms that AI is becoming a translator and accelerator in the modernization space, particularly in tackling undocumented or poorly understood legacy code. Competitors like BMC and IBM themselves are deeply invested in similar capabilities. BMC, for instance, has focused heavily on automating database changes and leveraging AI for predictive analytics in operations. Broadcom, with its CA portfolio, continues to focus on enhancing the mainframe experience within the context of its own enterprise software strategy. Rocket, with its recent backing from Bain Capital and its acquisition history, has consistently focused on being the essential independent glue that binds core systems to modern infrastructure. This release reinforces that position. The ability to integrate AI into existing ChangeMan and Workload Automation products for code explanation and anomaly detection is a smart way to deliver immediate, tangible DevEx improvements without forcing a rip-and-replace approach. This approach resonates with the vast number of large organizations prioritizing optimization over wholesale migration. The market demands continuous modernization.
Looking Ahead
Based on what I am observing, the conversation surrounding core system modernization has decisively pivoted from "if" to "how," and Rocket Software's focus on DevEx is a recognition that the "how" requires mitigating the human-centered friction points. The key trend that I am going to be looking out for is the performance of their AI-powered code explanation in real-world environments. Explaining COBOL via a Large Language Model API is technically challenging given the complexity and often fragmented nature of enterprise COBOL applications. If the solution can reliably and accurately distill business rules from millions of lines of heritage code, that is a marvelous capability.
My perspective is that this announcement puts pressure on competitors like Broadcom, IBM and BMC to accelerate their own Generative AI adoption specifically tailored for the developer workflow on IBM Z. When you look at the market as a whole, the announcement reinforces the concept that the mainframe is not going anywhere; it is simply becoming a component in a hybrid digital estate, and its access layer must be consumerized for a new generation of developers. Going forward, I am going to be closely monitoring how the company performs on customer adoption metrics—specifically, how many new, non-mainframe-native developers they onboard to core systems using these new tools in the next three quarters. HyperFRAME will be tracking how the company does in proving that AI can meaningfully increase velocity and quality on heritage systems in future quarters. The future of core systems agility hinges on whether this AI can truly scale expertise.
Steven Dickens | CEO HyperFRAME Research
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the CEO and Principal Analyst at HyperFRAME Research.
Ranked consistently among the Top 10 Analysts by AR Insights and a contributor to Forbes, Steven's expert perspectives are sought after by tier one media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and CNBC, and he is a regular on TV networks including the Schwab Network and Bloomberg.