Companies providing services to the mainframe community are essential to our industry’s success. At this summer’s SHARE Kansas City Conference, the SHARE’d Intelligence Editorial Advisory Committee members had the opportunity to meet a number of these organizations and decided to highlight independent software vendors who partner with SHARE, so readers can learn more about their work, journeys, and value. Read on for our first spotlight — featuring SVA Software, Inc.
Can you give an overview of your organization? What challenges do you help clients solve?
SVA’s mission is to help customers understand their IT infrastructure. We provide insights for them to make smarter decisions about investments and resource allocation. We help our mainframe clients manage their z/OS environment by controlling costs, ensuring Enterprise License Agreements are being met, and increasing operational stability. Our service provides expertise and guidance that may be missing from a mainframe support team.
How did your organization come about? Share your origin story.
Our parent company, SVA GmbH, headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany, is one of the biggest business partners of IBM worldwide, and the biggest privately held system integrator in Germany. We employ around 3,500 people and average $2BN in annual revenue. While SVA’s global business is about hardware, software, and services, the U.S. subsidiary SVA Software, Inc. is focused on software and services. We help our customers to gain insights into their IT infrastructure, all the way from hybrid applications to the VMware layer and ultimately to z/OS and the mainframe, our core competency.
Why the mainframe market?
I’d ask: why not? The mainframe is vital to the stability of the global economy and fight against cyber terrorism. We understand the importance of the platform and the specific challenges that mainframe users face. As of today, around 70% of business-critical applications run on the mainframe; it’s quite literally the platform that makes the world go round. We strongly believe in the continuous potential in this business area.
What have clients achieved with your solutions?
Our clients have saved millions of dollars and prevented countless outages by using SVA’s zOptimization software and services. We help large retailers navigate through tricky seasonal spikes, while still controlling costs. We help banks and other financial institutions during their month-end processing and related business challenges. We support Managed Service Providers (MSP) to handle more customers with the efficient use of our solutions. Ultimately, we become part of the client team and are invested in helping clients achieve their business goals.
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?
We are not merely a software company — we are a services company that uses our own powerful software tool to deliver value to mainframe clients. We understand the challenges they face, and we specifically tailor our service to deliver results in a way that is easy to understand and implement. Our team is composed of people who have a deep understanding of what it means to be a mainframe end user — and that is reflected in the care and attention we give our clients. Most customers don’t need another tool or more data to overcome the daily challenges, but a team of trusted advisors that help them sail through rough seas.
What is something readers may be surprised to learn about your organization or product?
How quickly we are able to provide value, since our solution doesn’t require any on-prem software to implement. As soon as the client is able to send us daily SMF data, we begin monitoring and tuning and our clients are astonished at the insights we are able to provide in a short amount of time. We receive the most positive feedback around how comfortable they feel around our experts — we integrate the teams and make the efforts seamless.
Why are you passionate about your organization and the mainframe community?
The mainframe is not just another computer running some applications in a cold room somewhere. If IT platforms were body parts, the mainframe would be the heart. Even if the mainframe roles have diminished and some applications have been migrated off platform — the mainframe nevertheless remains vital to daily operations, no matter if you’re an insurance company, or a retail store. And like the heart, these systems are complex and require skills and experience to keep them running smoothly and efficiently. We understand the challenges that mainframe clients face, and our solutions are cost effective remedies that truly help.
If your organization is an independent vendor and a partner of SHARE, please reach out to our editorial team to be interviewed and featured in this Supporter Spotlight series.