"I talk to hundreds of customers a year. I ask them what are the challenges they face," said Dayton Semerjian, general manager for mainframes for CA Technologies.

Semerjian listed three challenges he had repeatedly heard: controlling costs, maintaining skillsets as the older workforce retires and increasing the agility of the mainframes.

The new releases address all these concerns, Semerjian said.

Overall, 84 programs in CA's integrated stack of 234 mainframe programs have been updated.

One program that CA has updated is the CA Mainframe Software Manager (MSM), which is software that streamlines the process of installing other CA programs. The new edition radically simplifies the process of software configuration. In many cases, configuring new software on a mainframe can take up to a day or more, though this new software can cut that time to less than an hour, Semerjian said.