ISV
Independent software vendor: a company other than IBM that sells software for the mainframe.
Also written independent software vendor, vendor product, third-party software
An ISV, or independent software vendor, is a company that sells software but is not the maker of the platform. On the mainframe, that means companies other than IBM. Large ones include Broadcom, BMC and Rocket Software, and there are many smaller specialists.
A typical site runs dozens of ISV products alongside IBM's: schedulers, security tools, monitors, file tools, debuggers, source code managers, sort products and more. Many products you meet in daily work, and many names in job ads, come from ISVs.
ISV products are installed and maintained much like IBM's, often with SMP/E, and are licensed separately. Many are priced on the capacity of the machine they run on, so a hardware upgrade can increase ISV costs too. That is one reason sites review their software regularly and sometimes replace one product with another.
When you hear an unfamiliar product name in a meeting, it is often an ISV product. Asking what it does, and which IBM function it adds to or replaces, is a quick way to place it.
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- SMP/ESystem Modification Program/Extended: the tool used to install and maintain z/OS and other software, keeping a record of every piece and every fix.
- MIPSMillions of instructions per second: the common, rough way of describing how much processing capacity a mainframe has.
- Source code managerA tool that stores mainframe source code, tracks every version, and moves changes through test stages to production in a controlled way.
- Control-MBMC's batch scheduling product, which decides when each job runs based on times, dependencies and conditions.
- File ManagerA tool for browsing and editing data files field by field, using a copybook to show each record in a readable layout.