BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench Reviews

Vendor: BMC

3.6 out of 5

7 reviews
71% willing to recommend

263 followers

What is BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench?

Topaz Workbench provides an intuitive interface that enables developers of all experience levels to initiate Compuware’s industry-leading developer tools, Abend-AID, File-AID, Hiperstation, Xpediter and Strobe, as well as non-Compuware products and distributed solutions in the same environment.

Get the BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench Buyer's Guide and find out what your peers are saying about BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench, BMC Compuware Xpediter, IBM Rational Developer for z Systems and more!

BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench is the #1 ranked solution in top Mainframe Application Development solutions. PeerSpot users give BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench an average rating of 7.2 out of 10. BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench is most commonly compared to BMC Compuware Xpediter: BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench vs BMC Compuware Xpediter. BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 82% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a financial services firm, accounting for 30% of all views.

Buyer's Guide

BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench

February 2025

Get the report

Helped 832,138 peers since 2012

Featured reviews

Jill Wilkey

Technical Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

At this time I do not know of additional improvements from my perspective. Over the last year, Compuware has made major improvements to the JES Explorer, which used to be the biggest negative. There are some tools in ISPF that are not available outside of ISPF right now, things the programmers may need to look at. They still have to go to the green screen for a few things. Since we have the free version of Topaz, we do not have access to the new 3270 emulator that can handle this situation in Eclipse. We have noticed that Topaz supported Eclipse environments are rather old. It would be nice if Topaz were compatible with the more current Eclipse releases. The current version of Eclipse supported by Topaz is Photon.

Read full review

Jerry Edgington

Senior Assistant Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would look for more cooperation between the vendors and using Eclipse the way Eclipse is meant to be used. Topaz Workbench often doesn't play well with other plugins in the environment. It would be good if the vendors would work together or at least have some collaboration between them, so they would know what would work and what wouldn't work. Right now, the way things are working, they're relying on the customer to make everything work. I would like to see the features include more integration or help customers when working with Jenkins. It would be nice to have an audit trail to see what mainframe developers are using what. We are trying to get more people to use the product at the moment. I would like to expand its usage because it is a good product for development.

Read full review

Jason Shewbert

Lead Mainframe Systems Programming Analyst at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

Initially, it was fairly complicated. Topaz leverages the functionality from other products quite a bit, and the setup issues were attributed to those other products: things that we didn't have in place, we didn't have installed, we didn't have configured. I spent a lot of time going through the features of Topaz that were not working, trying to find which product it was that was missing a configuration step or a setup step. That took me the better part of six to eight months to get it all ironed out. It was fairly complicated to get all of the features and functions working. As far as Topaz itself goes, they're just built-in and expected to work, but as I said, those features are really attributed to other products, the setup and configuration that's required for those products. But since we've gone through those initial setups, doing upgrades and doing maintenance has been really straightforward. There has really not been a lot to do in the configuration and setup portions.

Read full review

BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench mindshare

As of February 2025, the mindshare of BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench in the Mainframe Application Development category stands at 27.9%, up from 26.4% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Mainframe Application Development

PeerAnalyst reports

Type	Title	Date
Category	Mainframe Application Development	Feb 1, 2025	Download
Product	Reviews, tips, and advice from real users	Feb 1, 2025	Download
Comparison	BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench vs Endevor	Feb 1, 2025	Download

Title	Rating	Mindshare	Recommending
BMC Compuware Xpediter	4.3	8.5%	100%	2 interviews Add to research
IBM Rational Developer for z Systems	0.0	25.1%	100%	0 interviews Add to research

Valuable Features

"We can develop in parallel today on ISPF, but it's giving us the advantage of the newer interface into the mainframe programming languages that younger programmers can use and are familiar with, rather than using the ISPF green screen."
"The smart editor helps because it will code-complete for me. I can see code working a lot faster and I'm able to get things coded in less time."
"Once we got the configurations and deployment rolled out, it was very stable. I haven't had any major issues with Eclipse or the Topaz Workbench plugins."

Room for Improvement

"I'm waiting to see what 19.2 for Topaz looks like, but I have a problem with the JES Explorer right now. It limits you to a certain prefix for job names and there are some groups that have multiple prefixes that they'd like to see all at once in their job names, because of how they work in a group. And they can't see that in the JES Explorer."
"It would be good if the vendors would work together or at least have some collaboration between them, so they would know what would work and what wouldn't work. Right now, the way things are working, they're relying on the customer to make everything work."
"It would be nice to have an audit trail to see what mainframe developers are using what."

Pricing

"It has saved our developers time and effort when working on documentation, which is now more readable and fluent."
"In general, Compuware tools are very competitive."
"The only thing I would mention related to the licensing and/or the pricing, is that they have some visualization features in there that are licensed by concurrent users. We're starting to trip up on that. We're looking to probably increase the number of concurrent licenses that we have. But those types of licensing strategies, where they license by concurrent users or the number of seats is confusing for some people. They don't understand why it works sometimes and doesn't work other times."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Review data by company size

By reviewers

By visitors reading reviews

Top industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

30%

Insurance Company

19%

Computer Software Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Real Estate/Law Firm

Energy/Utilities Company

Media Company

Transportation Company

Non Profit

Construction Company

Legal Firm

Logistics Company

Wellness & Fitness Company

Performing Arts

University

Outsourcing Company

Compare BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench with alternative products

Learn more about BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench

Through Topaz Workbench, mainframe teams can:

Access Compuware development tools, providing the ability to visualize complex application logic and data relationships, make changes to code, test and debug, and performance tune
Leverage existing Eclipse frameworks and integrations with popular open-system tools
Manage source code and promote artifacts through the development lifecycle via integration with ISPW
Leverage a multi-language, multi-platform source code editor
Use JES functions like job submission, review, print and purge
Use Host Explorer for z/OS navigation, including dataset management (i.e., allocation, recall, deletion); build mainframe projects to isolate and quickly access files associated with a unit of work
Copy files from one LPAR to another with a simple drag and drop or right click; data is compressed and the processing is zIIP enabled for optimal performance
Leverage integrations with other industry-leading tools