Rocket Software is introducing Rocket Process Insights.

IT leaders are often pressed to enhance or integrate systems as a daunting monolith, unable to tease apart key components or discern business-critical needs from superficial improvements. With Rocket Process Insights, businesses can better understand how to prioritize their strategic modernization projects, drive continuous delivery against their plans, and quickly show bottom-line results to the business.

“With Rocket Process Insights, IT leaders finally have an answer to the most fundamental modernization question, ‘Where do I start?’” said Chris Wey, President, Power Systems Business Unit at Rocket Software. “For the critical systems driving business, the scope of potential automation and modernization projects can be daunting. By isolating the areas where integration, new experiences, and automation can be most impactful, organizations can focus their investments most successfully.”

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of digital transformation, as organizations suddenly were forced to drastically change how they did business. In spring 2021, Azurite Consulting conducted a study to learn whether businesses included in their digital transformation a plan to shift away from IBM i and IBM Z platforms in response to the pandemic. Of the 250 IBM i/Z decision makers who responded, more than 83% said they have no plans to migrate off their core IBM i/Z infrastructure. In fact, 69% of larger IBM i businesses (those with more than 100 LPARS), said they are committed to modernizing or optimizing their systems, compared to 63% in December 2019.

To achieve ongoing innovation, businesses increasingly rely on IT to play a strategic role. Because critical business systems like IBM i are not going away, modernizing their applications needs to be a part of that strategy. To be effective, though, businesses need to know where to start on their modernization journey. Without end-to-end visibility across IBM i application workflows, prioritizing work is a guessing game. It is only when businesses clearly understand how they engage the application that they can smartly build a modernization plan that enables innovation and drives real business value.

Rocket Process Insights is a highly visual tool designed specifically for IBM i, unobtrusively learning the who, what, when, where, and how of the business’s engagement with critical applications. From there, Rocket Process Insights builds a heatmap of the activity, which analysts can use to drill down further to see the specific green screens accessed, function keys triggered, and more. This insight is then used to focus and prioritize areas in the workflows that are ripe for modernization or automation.

“Modernization on high-end platforms such as IBM i is critical to today’s organizations but requires a deeper understanding of common workflows and challenges for it to be done correctly, efficiently and cost effectively,” said Peter Rutten, Research Director, Performance Intensive Computing Solutions at IDC. “Today’s businesses have hundreds of applications running on their IBM i systems that are extremely important to their operations. Rocket Process Insights provides an exceptional level of insight into their workflows that will help businesses evolve their IBM platforms without interrupting those workflows.”

Rocket Process Insights is part of a larger portfolio of modernization products from Rocket Software that include Rocket Modern Experience for modern user experiences, Rocket Process Integration to help connect IBM i/Z applications to the rest of the business, and Rocket Process Automation that enables businesses to extend their automation projects into the last mile of legacy applications.