BMC Data Management for IMS and DB2 on zOS Reviews

What is our primary use case?

I work for a huge bank, we use this solution for applications for grants, loans, and other stuff for our bank. DB2 is great. It is very robust with a great capacity to deliver the applications. For bank applications, it's the best on the market. A lot of the major banks in my country use it. 

What is most valuable?

I have worked with DB2's great features in the last five years. The IDAA feature transformed the vision of warehousing, business analytics, and big data at my bank. Besides the mainframe, I saw that this solution was evolutionary. It gives real-time information.  

What needs improvement?

DB2 is a hard tool to grasp. It's hard for users to learn how to use it. It's not easy to see how it works.   They need to improve this aspect of the solution. We've been working on it for 20 years so it's easy for us but it's very difficult to understand for newer users. It's harder to comprehend than other databases on the market. There should be better tutorials with better visuals. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is very good. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is very good. They have a great success rate for the capacity of the application and scalability. I don't know of another database with this capacity.

How are customer service and support?

We have had a few problems with support so I would rate them a nine out of ten.  They didn't give us the answers we needed for our problems. We would try to explain the problem and they would give us a simple answer that didn't help. They didn't understand that our question was deeper than what they thought. I would have to schedule more meetings with them in order to actually get the problems resolved. Their techs need to be more experienced. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. The time it takes to deploy a solution depends on the architecture. For a normal application for ZOS, starting from the development environment and pre-production, it should take around one week.  We have a web feed and JPBC inside ZOS. It takes longer for this, around two weeks. There are more inquiries and more analysis required. 

What other advice do I have?

I've had a great experience with BMC, but when a new feature or a new version would be announced, I felt that BMC was late to implement.  I would rate DB2 a nine out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises