This spotlight series, highlighting independent software vendors essential to our industry’s success, now turns to DTS Software, LLC. Steve Pryor is the chief technical officer for the company. Read on to learn his reasons for DTS’s focus on the mainframe space.
Can you give an overview of your organization?
DTS Software is one of the oldest leading independent software vendors in the mainframe marketplace. We're a small company, which allows us to respond quickly to customer needs and technical challenges. At the same time, we have a worldwide presence and we're widely known throughout the mainframe space for our deep expertise in storage management and our unmatched technical support.
How did your organization come about? I.e., share your origin story.
In the mid-1980s, the company's founders, Don Thimsen and Tom Williamson, recognized a need to prevent the runaway out-of-disk-space conditions that often caused critical jobs to fail, wasting valuable time and resources. They developed the first automatic disk space error-recovery product, which was wildly successful, and whose descendants remain in widespread use to this day. In the succeeding years, the company has grown and developed many additional products and services that help storage and systems administrators manage today's complex storage management environment.
What challenges do you help clients solve?
Our software allows customers to ensure the 100% uptime that the modern business environment requires, and to maximize their storage investment. We concentrate on storage and systems management, with products that dynamically prevent production job failures, that automatically enforce system standards and respond to storage shortages, as well as storage migration tools and reporting facilities for system administrators.
Why the mainframe market?
The mainframe market is where DTS got its start, and while it may not be considered particularly ‘sexy,’ the mainframe environment is where the world's largest, fastest, most critical, and most demanding needs are met. When a system is needed that's maximally secure and maximally reliable, there's no substitute for the mainframe. The largest corporations rely heavily on the mainframe, and the steady growth in mainframe capacity means that there will be a place for DTS to provide mainframe products and expertise for years to come.
What have clients achieved with your solutions?
Many clients rely on DTS' flagship product, Space Recovery System (SRS) to make certain that no critical job ever fails due to a lack of disk space. Other clients rely on the policy 'rules engine' in DTS products to enhance system reliability in ways that just aren't available in the base operating system itself. For example, some customers use Allocation Control Center (ACC) to prevent the incorrect use of VSAM record level sharing logfiles (such as specifying a test logfile for a production dataset). Similar policy rules in use at these customers can take on tasks such as controlling the use of 'firecall' IDs when logging on to the system or eliminating undesirable ERASE parameters specified for DELETEs of VSAM datasets.
You compete against some of the largest software companies in the world, so how do you ensure that your product offers a unique value or competitive advantage that distinguishes it from solutions provided by larger, more established vendors in the industry?
One of the ways that we ensure our products remain valuable and distinctive is to continue our tradition of 'building rather than buying'. Unlike almost any other ISV, all of the DTS products are developed and maintained entirely in-house. Working on products we've developed ourselves, we know the software intimately and can respond immediately to customer questions and requests for enhancements. This, along with close relationships to customers we've had for many years, allows us to compete easily against much larger, slower, less nimble competitors.
What is something readers may be surprised to learn about your organization or product?
Despite the small, independent nature of our company, the outsize impact we have on data center operations can be surprising. Our products perform critical functions in many data centers — so critical in fact, that some large corporations will not implement an operating system upgrade unless they are certain that they will have the DTS products available. DTS Software takes part in IBM's early-release programs to make sure that all of our products will function properly on the newest versions of the system.
Why are you passionate about your organization and the mainframe community?
The mainframe really still runs modern civilization, and we're excited to be a part of that. Mainframers as a group are among the most talented, reliable, and hard-working people around. At DTS, we're also trying to do our part to help bring new faces and younger talent into the industry with our monthly webinar series targeted at mainframe skills for those new to the platform. The mainframe isn't new, but it's still exciting and it's likely to be around for a long time yet to come.
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