Company Overview

The NRB Group is at the forefront of the Belgian information and communication technology (ICT) landscape, generating over €500 million in turnover with a vibrant team of 3,450 innovators, all united by a European vision. NRB aims to pioneer cutting-edge IT solutions and services, building transformative, long-term partnerships with public and private sector clients to drive technological, economic, and societal evolution. Offering a full spectrum of information and communication technology (ICT) services—consultancy, software, infrastructure & cloud services, and managed staffing—NRB is redefining the future of technology. Their clientele includes leading financial institutions, government agencies, and other organizations that rely on advanced mainframe operations.

The Challenge

Many organizations delay modernizing mainframe applications due to concerns about risks, resource demands, and maintaining reliability. NRB, a leading IT services provider in Belgium and Europe, faces these challenges as its customers increasingly seek rapid and large-scale modernization.

These challenges impact NRB by requiring significant effort to modernize development pipelines with new integrated environments, enabling in-house developers to create modern applications. NRB’s approach is first to modernize software development before tackling the applications themselves. By automating and modernizing development pipelines, NRB introduces new integrated development environments that have proven effective in making customers’ in-house developers self-sufficient in creating modern mainframe applications. The varying levels of existing automation and resistance to adopting new tools among developers add complexity, making it a full-time job for NRB to ensure smooth transitions and maintain customer satisfaction.

“Our challenge is that we have many different customers, and they have a lot of different technology in place,” says Benoît Ebner, System Engineer at NRB.

Some customers don’t have automation in their existing development pipelines. Some don’t really have pipelines at all. Hardly any have modern tooling. In some cases, NRB is replacing development tools that have been in place for 25 years and are used daily by the people who created them. Modern development pipelines require modern tooling but getting developers to change their preferences and long-used tools at the pace organizations want to modernize can be an obstacle. NRB’s approach has a solution for that, too.

The Solution

NRB accelerates mainframe application modernization for its customers by empowering developers to create modern, new mainframe software without leaving their preferred development environments. Utilizing BMC AMI DevX solutions, NRB bridges the gap between legacy and modern mainframe development.

NRB builds modern mainframe development pipelines for its customers using a variety of BMC AMI DevX solutions. The foundation building block is BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline, a CI/CD tool that supports the three leading interfaces for developing and maintaining mainframe code: Eclipse, VS Code, and the ISPF interface. This flexibility allows experienced mainframe developers to enhance and extend mainframe applications using the environment where they’re most comfortable while enabling new developers to contribute effectively.  

NRB is using BMC AMI DevX solutions to implement DevOps automation throughout mainframe environments tailored to differing customer needs, implementing tools like:

• BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline for mainframe source code management, including governing code checkout, enabling concurrent code access and development, automating approvals, and other tasks
• BMC AMI DevX File-AID for developers to edit and browse IBM Db2®, IBM IMS^TM, SQL Server, Oracle, and VSAM files
• BMC AMI DevX Code Debug for mainframe application debugging, abend resolution, testing, and more
• BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID to automatically detect and diagnose code failures in real-time, conduct root cause analysis, and integrate with development and system management solutions
• BMC AMI DevX Data Studio to discover, visualize, and work with data from mainframe and non-mainframe environments concurrently, manage data objects, compare, extract, and process data, mask PII and other sensitive data, and more
• BMC AMI Strobe to proactively monitor mainframe performance early and automatically in CI/CD pipelines
• BMC AMI zAdviser to collect development metrics and analyze them to improve code quality

“These options allow organizations to modernize at their own pace, ensuring a seamless transition while maintaining productivity,” says Benoît.

The Results

NRB’s customers now experience development acceleration in a coordinated, controlled manner, minimizing risks to mainframe stability. Modernizing legacy toolsets with a modern, automated DevOps suite enables more automation and improved mainframe software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) management.

“We gain more control over what is done on the system. We can now track every change and perform quick fallbacks in production,” says Benoît. “Before, we couldn’t do that. Our customers spend a lot of time analyzing how to handle fallbacks in case of a production issue. Now, you right-click to fallback, and it’s finished. You can restore services in about 10 minutes; before, it was multiple hours.”

NRB also prevents problems by monitoring development and analyzing code changes with BMC AMI zAdviser, which provides DORA metrics and other insights into the development process.

“It has provided us with greater insight into the productivity of mainframe development,” says Benoît. “We now have access to many statistics and KPIs that we didn’t have before, which helps us identify areas for improvement.”

By allowing developers to work in their preferred environments within a framework that automates pipelines, integrations, and troubleshooting, NRB boosts developer productivity and reliability. This strategy not only expands customer application development pipelines but also increases the number of developers who can contribute to the development process, specifically those who can write code for mainframes. By enlarging this pool of developers, the strategy ensures that more skilled professionals will be available to work on mainframe-related projects in the future.

“When you hired young developers, you used to be afraid they wouldn’t want to work in the mainframe environment because of the green screen,” says Benoît. BMC AMI eliminates that concern by supporting VS Code, Eclipse, and the ISPF interfaces. “I teach at our local university. When the students see this, many of them say, ‘Hey, maybe I could start working with mainframe systems because they are really cool and impressive.’ They enable application development to integrate with a modern, user-friendly environment without requiring an understanding of how it functions behind the scenes.