This product has helped our organization since we are now be able to automate things; things don't break as much. There are not so many human interactions so as to make mistakes.

One of the biggest advantages is the prevention of problems from getting more severe. If you know what's going on, and if there are things that you can do to automate your responses, it makes your life easier. I now get very few calls during the on-call period and, in part, it's because we know what's going on and can automate responses.

The benefit is that the ROI, since it's 35 years old, the ROI is coming back over and over and over.

I don't think it improves the way our company functions. Because of its age, it's a little bit difficult to modernize some of the integrations and some of the functions. The people who support it limits us, but at the same time it's providing us benefit.

I think from our standpoint, from automation, automation is central. We've reduced people from making mistakes. We've actually improved performance because now, OPS/MVS is doing things more efficiently than a person would do; they may make mistakes; finger checks here. OPS/MVS will do it automatically, and that's been working well.

It’s invaluable for expediting the shutdowns/IPLs of our z/OS LPARs and monitoring our z/OS LPARs for issues/problems.

The benefits are the ability to do monitoring on your mainframe systems exactly the way you want to do it. It provides a lot of flexibility. That really improves the way our organization functions.

We control our DR tests with OPS/MVS as a wrapper to IBM’s GDPS so our operations staff does not have to manage using their interface in NetView. We also have other “applications” like managing logical engines on LPARs.

OPSMVS has made it possible to run our IT systems with fewer staff, due to the level of automation that we are able to use.

This does mean that skills tend to be lost over time, as people are no longer carrying out manual tasks. Therefore, it is vital to have both high stability and meticulous user-maintained documentation.

We have managed to avoid a lot of incidents with it. We can, in fact, with OPS/MVS cope with some incidents before they happen.

It does what it's supposed to do. What we need it to do is just bring our tasks up and bring them down, and in the right order.

It allows us to respond faster to issues. If there are issues that come out, we're able to capture a message and alert somebody about it.

Our largest LPAR currently has 633 tasks defined to SSM. We can shut the system down and have it back up in 30 minutes. Without SSM, that could not be possible.

It watches the slug, the BDIs, and the other systems that we have. It alerts the operators when it is time to repair the communications and the IPLs.

To reduce the number of repetitive motions required by a human to respond to the system. This automation automatically replies, so the benefit is to reduce repetition of work.

With this tool, there is now less operator intervention and more of an automated, streamlined process. It's given us the ability to track problems and create service tickets to resolve them.

I've always had it, so I don't really know that I can say how it improves my organization. I don't have anything to compare it to.

It's very active at keeping our start tasks on the mainframe up and running for our business solutions.

After implementing SSM, we dropped our IPL time from 40 minutes via manual commands to eight minutes via SSM.

Orderly startup and shutdown of z/OS and all components.

We have eliminated human error in the startup of one of our most critical applications, thereby reducing the risk of unwanted downtime.

The product is so advanced in all ways that it's hard to pick a specific area. OPSLOG and MSF has saved us more than once when a system was unavailable via TSO, but we could see what was going on via our cross domain logs. This allowed us to correct the problem with an actual IPL of the system.

The ability to manipulate the autoflag has allowed us to setup the kind of message forwarding that is important to our end users.

All of the OPS/REXX built in functions are great. We've recently used OPSTATUS to give our operators extra info they needed about WTORS that wasn't available via system commands.

It's made it so that with a lot of automation pieces we can bring this region up or take this region down, and it allows us to actually always meet our time critical requirements. If it's supposed to be up at 8am, it comes up at 8am. 

Once automatic IPL has been defined, anyone can perform an IPL with very little intervention. We know that all of the components will be started correctly.

Also, because we can define complex commands, the training of new operators is quicker. We can also put checks in place that will prevent user errors.

It can save money. If something is late, there are lots of dollars lost.

It’s a mature product that does what it’s supposed to do and does exactly what we bought it for.