Building PropelZ: Customer-Driven Mainframe Integration

How does customer-driven development shape an enterprise mainframe data integration product? VirtualZ Computing CTO Vince Re explains how the most important features of PropelZ — VirtualZ's no-code tool for moving and replicating IBM Z mainframe data to the cloud — came directly from real enterprise customer problems rather than internal feature speculation.

Vince Re walks through specific origin stories: how a Microsoft Azure monitoring requirement led to the PropelZ Splunk connector, and how database teams' integration challenges drove automatic JDBC metadata discovery. The throughline is a development philosophy where each capability is built to solve a named customer's production problem first, then becomes a feature that serves an entire market.

In this episode of Skyward Data, the podcast from VirtualZ Computing:

- Why the PropelZ Splunk connector was built from Microsoft's Azure monitoring use case

- How database team challenges produced automatic JDBC metadata discovery

- Customer-first vs. feature-speculation product development, and the trade-offs of each

- Why production-tested integrations outperform theoretically designed features

- How solving one enterprise's mainframe data problem scales to a whole segment

PropelZ is part of VirtualZ Computing's no-code portfolio for enterprise mainframe data, alongside Lozen (live in-place data access), FlowZ (cloud storage for backup and archive), and Zaac (cloud and SAN as native z/OS storage). PropelZ is proven at 56,000 records per second, mainframe to cloud.

Topics: mainframe modernization, IBM Z, no-code data integration, ETL alternatives, Splunk integration, JDBC, customer-driven product development, hybrid cloud.

Listen to more Skyward Data episodes: https://virtualzcomputing.com/podcasts/