BPER Banca, one of Italy’s largest banks, has migrated about 30 services from its mainframes to a Linux environment with tools from LzLabs and technical and business support services from CWS. The applications chosen for the first phase of migration control BPER’s front end customer portals, used to manage its retail banking account access.
BPER Banca Migrates Core Banking Services to LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe
BPER Banca trusts LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® to run critical online banking applications
Zurich, 09 March 2021 – LzLabs, together with our partner CWS, today announced that major Italian retail bank BPER Banca (BPER) has completed the first phase of migrating core banking services to LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® (LzSDM®). Working with LzLabs, these services have been migrated, incrementally, to open systems without any recompilation or data changes.
The services chosen for the first phase of migration control BPER’s front end customer portals, where branch offices and customers manage online banking and credit cards. By the end of 2021, further workloads will be migrated to system testing and, ultimately, production on LzSDM. The company goal is to build a modern IT environment for enterprise applications, through which it can reduce its time to market by testing more rapidly and more extensively, and by deploying new features faster.
Using LzLabs’ unique incremental migration approach, the BPER team could focus on migrating services and applications that require modernization to a Linux operating environment and container technology, in a phased process. LzLabs’ approach allowed data to remain on BPER‘s mainframe during the first phase. Without any recompilation or data changes, the switch could be achieved with minimal service interruption.
The LzSDM instance of BPER’s application workload (which was initially based on COBOL, Assembler, C, CICS, DB2) will provide comparable reliability, availability, serviceability and security of the mainframe. Applications will run within virtual machines on x86 servers in an integrated, open environment.
In an increasingly competitive banking market, BPER’s incremental migration will drive greater agility in its business processes, most notably by enabling continuous development and testing of software updates for a number of banking products.
“The financial services industry is one of many facing increasing pressure to modernize IT environments and we’re pleased to be helping BPER to do just that” said Thilo Rockmann, CEO, LzLabs. “BPER’s innovative step towards open systems is part of an upward trend. We see others following suit to modernize proprietary IT systems and gain greater advantages from open and cloud environments.”
“We chose LzSDM as it is the only platform that could support the incremental migration of our applications to a modern platform, while meeting our requirements for testing, controlling IT costs and, ultimately, accelerating time to market in our application portfolio.” said Omar Campana, IT Director, BPER Banca. “Our core banking applications can now be gradually moved to a platform for innovation that will better serve the future needs of our business.”
LzLabs Announces ARM® Support in a Growing Commitment to Evolving Cloud Deployment Architectures
LzLabs announces LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® (LzSDM®) version 3
Zurich, 2 February 2021 – LzLabs today announced, with its latest version release, that mainframe IT users can migrate their legacy applications to a variety of cloud infrastructures with LzSDM on Linux. Migration to LzSDM does not require any program recompilation or data changes.
LzSDM version 3 not only operates on multiple processor architectures, including Intel x86 and ARM systems, but also represents the building block for future cloud deployments. LzSDM with Linux enables original legacy mainframe application programs to operate in native hardware mode, regardless of the underlying hardware system implemented in the cloud or on premise.
The wide range of platform choices enhances LzLabs’s commitment to high performance computing for applications, including legacy databases and transaction processing systems.
LzLabs CEO, Thilo Rockmann, said: “LzSDM is the only enterprise software product which enables legacy mainframe applications to run on multiple hardware platforms without recompilation or data changes. With this release of LzSDM we are increasing our commitment to cloud deployment choices.
“Whether companies use x86 on premise or in the cloud, we expect ARM to have a growing impact on the enterprise market. LzLabs has run LzSDM internally on a variety of platforms, including x86, ARM and Power, for the past few years in anticipation of this market evolution.”
LzLabs Executive Chairman, Mark Cresswell, added “LzSDM was designed to run on Linux and other common hardware platforms enterprise users require. ARM has attracted significant awareness in the enterprise sector because of its high computing power and low power consumption.
“Enterprise customers do not want to be locked into any hardware architecture again. LzSDM could only have been developed in an open software era, which leverages significant software development specifically designed to overcome vendor lock-in.”
IT Administrator: Mainframe goes Software
Etliche Unternehmen nutzen Mainframes für unternehmenskritische Geschäftsprozesse. Die Entwicklung und Modernisierung der dazugehörigen Applikationen verschlangen Unsummen. Fachkräftemangel, Vendor-Lock-in und die enormen Betriebskosten sind zusätzliche Herausforderungen. Mittels eines Software-defined Mainframes (SDM) können sich Organisationen schrittweise von ihrer Mainframe-Hardware lösen, weiterhin Legacy-Applikationen nutzen und so das Risiko für den geschäftskritischen Betrieb minimieren.
The Stack: Mainframe to Linux – still a howling headache of a job?
COBOL has hit the news in 2020 in unexpected ways. In November, popular longform story aggregator Longform.org led with a prominent piece on the “code that controls your money” — “COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system,” wrote Clive Thompson.
Earlier in the year, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy drew international media attention with a plaintive request for help knocking the back-end systems powering New Jersey’s emergency care system into shape: “Literally, we have systems that are 40 years-plus old, and there’ll be lots of postmortems,” he said, as New Jersey ran into issues modernising the system . And one of them on our list will be how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?” Murphy told the world.
