IntelliMagic and Watson & Walker: Partners in Mainframe Optimization

Company Overview 

Watson & Walker is a vendor-independent mainframe consultancy firm that provides practical mainframe performance and measurement advice. Founded by Cheryl Watson and Tom Walker in 1991, the Watson & Walker team is one of the best-known and respected z/OS performance and measurement advisory groups in the world. Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, named after the co-founder and mainframe legend, is the most comprehensive body of practical and impartial z/OS tuning and measurement advice ever published. 

The Challenge 

As the very nature of their business, Watson & Walker provides consulting services for clients spanning the globe, but their existing method of SMF performance analysis required manual coding, wasn’t dynamic or interactive, and couldn’t keep up with the pace of the demands from their work.  

Watson & Walker needed a way to quickly navigate and analyze the mainframe environment in order find performance optimization and cost reducing opportunities for their clients. 

Watson & Walker embarked on a research project to find the perfect SMF performance analysis tool available on the market. To meet Watson & Walker’s strict criteria, their chosen solution needed to: 

• Be powerful, robust, and interactive 
• Save time conducting analysis 
• Offer great customer support 
• Be up to date on the latest mainframe technology and metrics 

The Solution 

After analyzing the solutions on the market and consulting with customers from each of the solutions, Watson & Walker decided upon IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS. Since 2016, Watson & Walker has used IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS with their consulting efforts when helping customers and generating reports. 

“At the conclusion of our research, we found that IntelliMagic Vision, without a doubt, is heads and shoulders above anything else. We wouldn’t go anywhere without IntelliMagic Vision; it is powerful, easy to use, and is now a vital part of our toolkit when creating presentations, classes, Tuning Letters, or customer reports.” 

– Cheryl Watson, CEO and Founder, Watson & Walker 

Business Results 

The partnership between Watson & Walker and IntelliMagic allows mainframe customers to benefit from IntelliMagic Vision’s built-in intelligence and Watson & Walker’s unrivaled services. 

Using IntelliMagic Vision, Watson and Walker was able to: 

• save significant time by applying their experience to the analysis, not in trying to extract and organize the information out of SMF 
• more quickly and accurately spot tuning opportunities for cost reduction and performance optimization 
• take advantage of the built-in health insights to identify warnings and issues prior to their deep-dive analysis 

“What I liked most about IntelliMagic Vision was its automatic identifying of the key performance indicators, the KPIs, and the ability to drill down. The whole idea of looking at this boundless information from SMF, is that you don’t want to spend time looking at all that information. All you want to know is, is everything okay or is something wrong? So the ability to drill down, look at only one of the items instead of multiple is pretty powerful and takes no programming.”