IBM Z vs. Angles by Insightsoftware

We found its Data processing marvelous, and its benefit to accomplish chores in time gives us high authenticity and availability to the data deposit with accelerated admittance. One thing I will say that try to make it more user-friendly as it is difficult to learn. We liked it overall; Working is very good.

Incentivized

If you desire to 'empower' employees to create or edit their own reports, Noetix is a great tool, though I am not particularly an 'empowerment' person. In my experience most people have enough work of their own, so to tell them they now have to create their own reports can cause problems. If someone is available, like I am, to create the reports based on user requirements, then the report can be shared with the user and they can make changes as needed. I have several users who use the same report over and over for slightly different applications, and they are happy to make the small alterations, but creating whole new reports can seem like a daunting task. I tell my users I don't want them to become frustrated. If they want to try on their own, fine, but don't waste more than half an hour, and if you start to get frustrated, stop and IM me. Ninety-nine times out of 100 I already have a report that will give them exactly what they need. I've done extensive training, and find it's quite easy for users to pick up

Incentivized

• Transactional processing, including data entry across multiple departments
• Reporting on massive amounts of data, due to its scale and size of processing capabilities
• Analytics on data as there are various accelerators for both IBM's databases and others such as Oracle
• Security is another major benefit to this platform as it contains a non-open systems design

Incentivized

• Noetix makes reporting easy. Users can combine vtables (the Noetix term for its views), add or delete columns, add filters or parameters, sort, add totals to columns, all from an easy to use interface. It comes with a very large number of already written reports for all areas of Oracle reporting, but it also allows for custom vtables to be written, for Oracle or any database, to expand the number of available reports.
• Noetix has an Excel add-in that is marvelous. It eliminates the need to run a report in the web application and export to Excel. The add-in can run very large reports, up to a million lines. Once a report is run in Excel, it can be saved, and then refreshed whenever needed. It's a really good tool.
• Noetix is flexible. Joins can be added to existing Noetix vtables and also to custom vtables, to give users a large amount of data configurations to choose from. It also allows users to create calculated fields to any report.
• Noetix is easy to administer. Users can be added or removed and grouped by the level of permission. Although, in our case, it validates against Oracle, the level of security is dictated by Noetix.

Incentivized

• IBM needs to add more focus on simplifying mainframe usage and management.
• Most modern programmers interface with the Z using an IDE. However, performing many tasks, such as cataloging a data set or checking on a job status, can require switching to the ISPF interface. Users want to interface with a GUI, not a function-key, menu and character-based interface like ISPF. Anything that can simplify and modernize interfacing with the mainframe should be a high priority for IBM.
• The IBM Z platform is one of the most instrumented computing platforms in the world, so there are a lot of metrics that could be automatically analyzed and used to improve the performance and management of the mainframe environment.

Incentivized

• I like the fact that the output is standard, but I would like to be able to move columns around on the output screen, rather than having to go back to the editing screen, move the columns, then rerun the report.
• Drag and drop of columns would be nice on the edit screen. Currently if you add a column to a report, it automatically goes to the bottom. Relocation of the column has to be done a line at a time. I would prefer to be able to grab the field I want from those available, and drop it into the report where I want it.
• When adding a filter (or parameter), the available fields automatically come up in alphabetical order, but on the columns screen, they don't. They come up in the order they actually are in the query. That means, when creating custom vtables, to have the fields in alphabetical order, one must put them that way. It would be nice if Noetix put the fields in alphabetical order for the user.

Incentivized

The IBM Z mainframe capabilities are unmatched for cloud readiness and optimization the learning capabilities are matched perfectly with Watson and the expandability of the cloud makes it a perfect choice.

Incentivized

pay as you go pricing

Incentivized

The Z in IBM Z is for zero down time. If you configure your system according to IBM's best practices, you can achieve zero downtime

Incentivized

Performance is a major part when you configure your system. IBM has many tools to study your system and suggest the appropriate configuration. With the right contract, you can add processing power dynamically and remove it when no longer needed

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Support is usually superb, only occasionally dropping to very good. We participate in some of the CD (Continuous Delivery) aspects of z/OS, IMS, MQ, and DB2.

Incentivized

Over my 33 years on this platform, I attended many in person courses, conferences, and other training opportunities.

Incentivized

There are many online courses from both IBM and other vendors. Most are great. All of the documentation is available online.

Incentivized

I do not personally have any key insights regarding implementation of IBM Z Enterprise Servers as that is what our mainframe architects do.

Incentivized

My answer is yes. This made moving to the cloud much easier. The main benefits of this are latency and data extraction. The speed, security and reliability is the game changer and where it stacks up when compared to other IBM products. Additionally, increasing the workload is also very helpful. Use a single platform to avoid unnecessary activities and actions, help maintain safety, and even recover quickly. Activities that users are unable to continue and complete tasks help avoid mistakes when there are errors related to And because it's perfect for your users, it has less impact on your business. Always ready for backup. I didn't even care about the migrations that were performed.

I believe Noetix is much easier to use than either Crystal Reports or InfoMaker. When I worked with InfoMaker I used to say it took 5 minutes to get the data and 5 hours (and sometimes days) to make it look good. The same can be true for Crystal Reports. Noetix has a standard format, and most people export to Excel anyway. Who prints reports? So formatting is not all that important.

Incentivized

If you need more processing power, just add more CPU's or memory. The largest system can have close to 200 CPU's and 40 TB of memory. If that is not enough, you can add more physical computers, and connect them using a sysplex

Incentivized

• It has increased the reliability of data which has decreased our dependence on legacy systems.
• It has no loss while migration which has a positive impact on ROI as we don't have to worry about data loss.
• It has multi tasking and support for non-cobol applications on mainframe.

Incentivized