CA Endevor Software Change Manager Review

Enables us to automate all our development implementations, saving us a lot of time

What is our primary use case?

We use it to control the source code versioning, implementation, generation, automation; pretty much anything that is source code on the mainframe. We manage COBOL assembler, we manage pretty much any mainframe language there is.

How has it helped my organization?

On the CA side, where we're doing the mainframe, our automation, our development implementations are all automated, which is a huge amount of time savings. That's a big one.

Even just in the last year or so, we had a need to start using a CICS web services, and mesh them in with some distributed functions on an enterprise service bus. We put the web services into Endevor and we manage that way now. That was a new code, a new code requirement, a new challenge.

What is most valuable?

I like it because it customizable, and it's rock steady, it's a very robust and mature product. Plus I love the audit trail.

What needs improvement?

If you had asked me this 10 years ago I would have had some good answers, but they pretty well addressed everything. They've got plug-ins now to run it through Eclipse, they've got a lot of APIs, they handle UNIX files. I can't really think of any serious lack that they haven't addressed. It's a mature product, and its really stable.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is a 10 out of 10.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is a 10 out of 10. For example, where I'm at now we manage about 15,000 pieces of code. In my previous job, where we actually used Endevor as well, we managed over 200,000 pieces of code. So you can see it's fairly scalable. 

How is customer service and technical support?

I think we've only had to call them about three times in the last 20 years, and that was really more or less searching for answers, not a product issue. And they're always more than happy to help. They do great work.

Which solutions did we use previously?

Back in the day, it was just hard to manage multiple code streams; concurrent development I guess is what it was really. We needed to be able to manage that in a rational manner and automate it, so that's really why Endevor was picked. Also, CA was the market leader and they had the pretty much best product, after we went through all the due diligence.

We used to use a homegrown, user-friendly, in-house program but Endevor was an industry standard. We didn't use a competing product because this in-house program wasn't a product.

How was the initial setup?

I think it's a pretty simple setup.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's competitively priced and, as far as I know, it's just an enterprise license. We have found it is worth the money. Right now, I'm really not even involved in the pricing of the product here at this shop, but in previous shops we've always found it was worth the money.

What other advice do I have?

I would say if you want a mainframe - any kind of mainframe - solution, or for software control management go for it. CA has good products. They're an industry standard in a lot of ways.

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