WALTHAM, Mass., Sept. 23, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rocket Software, a global technology leader in modernization software, today announced the expansion of Rocket^® EVA™, its agentic AI platform for mission critical systems. The expanded platform provides governed, auditable AI agents on the mainframe to correlate and reason across operational data and automate operational tasks within enterprise-defined policies. The latest capabilities expand the operational use cases teams can address with EVA, helping enterprises put agentic AI to work across mission-critical environments.

As enterprises bring AI to the mainframe, specialized expertise remains a significant challenge. According to a Hanover Research study for Rocket Software, 81% of financial services IT leaders report a very or extremely significant mainframe skills gap, while 87% believe AI will help address it over the next two years.

“Enterprises have relied on the mainframe to run their mission-critical workloads for decades,” said Milan Shetti, president and CEO of Rocket Software. “AI promises to unlock even more value from these environments, but only if enterprises can deploy it securely and without disruption. We’re helping customers apply agentic AI to mission-critical systems with speed, confidence, and control, closing the skills gap and putting that expertise within reach of every enterprise team.”

Backed by Rocket Software’s mainframe expertise, modernization portfolio and purpose-built AI architecture, EVA enables agents to understand and act on mainframe environments in real time. Global organizations across financial services, government, insurance, retail, and telecommunications are participating in EVA pilots. The focused pilot program enables customers to validate high-value operational use cases with their own data and move from installation to actionable insights within days, not weeks.

The expanded EVA platform includes the launch of Rocket^® PlanGuard™, a new security layer that puts a policy checkpoint between AI reasoning and system execution, extending auditable, highly scoped agent access to mainframe resources. PlanGuard adds a policy decision point and identity controls to ensure AI-driven actions remain within approved boundaries while maintaining enterprise control.

Putting Agentic AI to Work Across Core Operations

According to Hanover Research, 94% of financial services IT leaders rank enhancing IT operations with AI as a high or top priority. EVA uses natural language to apply AI to operational challenges that have traditionally required specialized expertise, multiple tools and significant manual analysis, significantly lightening the burden on IT teams. According to a recent Rocket survey of mainframe AI use, Rocket customers are seeing early success with EVA across a range of high-value operational use cases, including:

• Operations/Diagnostics: Identifies and correlates operational issues across systems to accelerate analysis and resolution, with use cases spanning job failure pattern analysis, operational dashboard and KPI generation, end-to-end agentic workflow automation, end-of-month financial reporting analysis, IBM^® CICS^® online banking application optimization, and IBM CICS queue and backlog analysis.
• Security: Protects critical systems and data with vulnerability detection, automated compliance, and intelligent patch management, and identification of emerging risks associated with Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC).
• Batch Processing: Assists teams in monitoring batch performance against SLAs, identify critical failures and investigate root causes faster through AI-assisted analysis.
• Application/Configuration Management: Helps pinpoint performance and configuration issues through high CPU utilization analysis and IBM^® Db2^® data sharing, buffer pool and cache degradation.
• Data: Advances Rocket's vision for unified enterprise data access, enabling more intelligent delivery and streamlined output management across the enterprise.
  

Together, these use cases show how EVA can reduce manual investigation and accelerate the path from operational issue to root cause and resolution.

Capabilities for Mainframe Professionals

EVA combines AI-powered assistance with governed access to help mainframe professionals work more efficiently while maintaining enterprise control:

• Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR): Quickly diagnose and resolve operational issues by connecting data, context, and expertise across mainframe and distributed environments, helping teams move from problem identification to resolution faster.
• Improve Visibility: Surface insights from logs, metrics, applications, and system data through a conversational experience, making it easier to understand system health, identify dependencies, and detect issues before they escalate.
• Preserve Expertise: Capture and operationalize institutional knowledge, enabling team members of all experience levels to benefit from the expertise of seasoned professionals and reducing reliance on a shrinking pool of specialists.
• Governed Mainframe Access: Keeps AI-driven actions within patent-pending defined policy boundaries through contextual, just-in-time authorization, with activity logged for auditability and human oversight supported where required.

The expansion also extends Rocket’s model-agnostic architecture with a lightweight, standards-based approach to connecting z/OS^® data. By simplifying access to operational and enterprise data while maintaining governance and control, EVA enables organizations to accelerate AI adoption across core business systems with less complexity and risk.

To learn more about Rocket Software’s AI and modernization solutions, visit www.rocketsoftware.com.

About Rocket Software

Rocket Software is a global technology leader in modernization and a partner of choice that empowers the world’s leading businesses on their IT and mainframe modernization journeys, spanning core systems to the cloud. Trusted by over 13,500 customers and 850 partners, and with more than 3,000 global employees, Rocket Software enables customers to maximize their data, applications, and infrastructure to deliver critical services that power our modern world. Rocket Software is a privately held U.S. corporation headquartered in the Boston area with centers of excellence strategically located throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Rocket Software is a portfolio company of Bain Capital Private Equity. Follow Rocket Software on LinkedIn, YouTube, and X or visit www.RocketSoftware.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What did Rocket Software announce?

Rocket Software announced an expansion of EVA, its agentic AI platform for core systems. The platform applies large language models and AI agents through governed, auditable access points, helping teams address operational tasks and challenges across the mainframe.

2. What does the expanded EVA platform do?

It provides a lightweight, model-agnostic framework that allows organizations to use generative AI tools to help address everyday mainframe tasks. It can access core z/OS data sources such as SMF records — including the RMF performance data they carry — along with job output and message queues, giving mainframe professionals AI-powered tools for chat, code assistance, and hybrid application integration.

3. Why is Rocket Software investing here?

Enterprises need a proven, customer-validated architecture for connecting AI to the mainframe. Rocket Software brings the scale, customer reach, and mainframe expertise needed to deliver these capabilities to more enterprises.

4. How does this enhance EVA?

The expansion pairs EVA’s operational intelligence and automation with the ability for AI agents to reason across operational context and take or recommend governed actions, broadening what customers can do with agentic AI on core systems.

5. What is Rocket^® PlanGuard™?

Rocket PlanGuard is a security layer within EVA that puts a policy checkpoint between AI reasoning and system execution, helping ensure actions stay within approved boundaries. It provides unprecedented agentic policy and identity management for safe, auditable mainframe visibility through EVA, while maintaining enterprise control.

6. What is agentic AI for the mainframe?

Agentic AI for the mainframe uses AI to answer questions in simple language by understanding the context of complex mainframe environments, reasoning through operational issues, and taking or recommending actions to resolve them. It can also help automate tasks such as monitoring systems, diagnosing problems, and identifying and fixing root causes — helping accelerate time to resolution and overcome skills gaps.

IBM, CICS, Db2, and z/OS are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.

For media inquiries:
Lacey Darrow
ldarrow@rocketsoftware.com