Blog

Your Needs, Our Focus: ITBI Improvements in 2025

By Nicklas Laine Overgaard, Chief Product & Technology Officer

As the year draws to a close, we’ve taken a moment to look back on some of the most important improvements to our ITBI™ solution in 2025. Throughout the year, we have worked closely with our customers and partners, listening to your feedback and turning it into concrete enhancements. 

Our goal is simple: make ITBI™ easier to use, more secure, and more valuable – both for specialists who live in the mainframe world and for stakeholders who need reliable insights. 

Authentication system migration

One of the biggest steps this year was upgrading the way customers access ITBI™. All tenants have now been migrated to ZITADEL, our new authentication platform. In practical terms, this gives us stronger security, better long-term support, and a foundation for introducing new identity features going forward.

Along with the migration, we introduced Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO). This means customers can now log in using their own corporate credentials and password policies. No extra ITBI™ -specific passwords to manage, no separate login routines, just a smoother experience for end users and less administrative overhead for IT teams. 

Finally, the move enabled Account Site Management. Customers can now manage user access rights directly through their own identity platform, giving them more control over who can see what in ITBI™ and helping ensure access stays aligned with internal governance and compliance requirements. 

Lakeview rollout

Another major update in 2025 has been the rollout of Lakeview to all existing customers. With this release, we are replacing the AWS Athena Console with Lakeview SQL Labs. The shift brings a more modern and user-friendly workspace for querying data, and on top of SQL Labs, Lakeview comes with a graphing and dashboarding engine, which unlocks a wide range of new visualization options. 

What does that mean day-to-day? Users get access to: 

• richer charting capabilities 
• improved dashboard experiences 
• an interface designed to make data exploration faster and clearer, even if you’re not working with SQL or mainframe data every day 

In parallel, we’re developing a set of new standard dashboards that will be available to all customers. These dashboards are designed to surface the most requested insights out of the box, so teams can spend less time building from scratch and more time acting on the results. 

Introducing Lake Reports

A direct customer request this year led to one of our most powerful additions to ITBI™: Lake Reports. We took the hands-on experience and insights from that customer project and turned them into standardized capabilities that all customers can benefit from.

With Lake Reports, customers can now build their own reports in Python and have them hosted and executed within ITBI™. Instead of exporting data and running scripts elsewhere, reporting can happen right where the data already lives, securely and at scale.

Lake Reports comes with a fully self-managed user interface in the ITBI™ portal. Customers can create, run, and maintain their reports without needing SMT Data involvement for day-to-day changes. This gives teams far more flexibility to tailor reporting to their own needs and timelines.

The relevance is very practical: many organizations need regular reporting on consumption, performance, and capacity. Traditionally, that kind of reporting might run on the mainframe itself, using valuable MIPS and competing with business workloads. By shifting these reporting jobs into ITBI™ via Lake Reports, customers can offload heavy processing from the mainframe while still getting clear outputs: visualizations, graphs, and structured reports that are easy to share beyond the mainframe specialist community. 

SMF Decoder v2 – now 10x faster

We also delivered SMF Decoder v2, a major performance upgrade to our ingestion pipeline. The new version runs up to 10x faster than before, which means SMF data lands in the data lake much sooner.

In practice, this brings ITBI™ a big step closer to near real-time data availability. Customers can access fresher operational data, react faster to changes, and base decisions on what’s happening now – not just what happened yesterday.

Updates to Data and ETL

Behind the scenes, 2025 also brought major improvements to ITBI™ ’s data foundation. Our Data/ETL layer has been updated to support IBM z17, ensuring customers can adopt the latest mainframe generation while keeping a consistent analytics experience in ITBI™ .

We also expanded the scope of reporting with new Disk and Tape capabilities, giving better visibility into storage usage and trends alongside traditional CPU and workload metrics.

Finally, we significantly expanded the data model. New fields, attributes, and cube measures have been added across multiple domains, which means richer context for analysis and more flexibility in dashboards and Lake Reports. In short: more of the data you care about is now structured and ready to use, without extra modeling work on the customer side. 

Next-Generation ITBI™ Portal upgrade

In 2025, we also delivered a broad upgrade of the ITBI™ Portal, rebuilding key parts of the platform to make insights more accessible, faster to act on, and easier to manage. The new portal brings a cleaner and more responsive user experience, with simplified navigation and smoother report handling, so users can get the information they need with fewer clicks and less friction. 

Beyond usability, the upgrade strengthens ITBI™ as a decision platform. Improved visualization and workflow support help teams move from data to action more quickly—whether they’re deep in mainframe performance analysis or simply need clear numbers for planning and reporting. 

Security and future-readiness were also central to this release. The portal now sits on a more modern architecture and integrates with our updated identity layer, ensuring stronger access control today and a foundation for continuous improvements going forward. 

This upgrade has been available to all customers on an opt-in basis since August 2025. On December 7th we rolled out the upgrade to all customers on our platform, so everyone now enjoys the new experience. 

 

Taken together, these updates reflect a clear direction for ITBI™: stronger identity and access, faster and more flexible data workflows, and a portal experience that makes mainframe insights easier to work with for everyone. Equally important, many of these improvements started with customer conversations and real-world use cases. So, thank you for continuing to challenge and guide us. 

Discover how the ITBI™ Portal can help you optimize mainframe performance, enhance capacity planning, and secure your data. Learn more at smtdata.com/ITBI™ .