LzLabs

LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe

Dan Pickles

Why is the mainframe holding organizations back from modernization? The results of the LzLabs and Microsoft Mainframe Modernization Survey are in…

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15 October 2018

Mark Cresswell, CEO, LzLabs

In conjunction with Microsoft we recently commissioned Vanson Bourne, a well-respected survey organization, to talk to 500 senior IT executives across almost that many companies using mainframe technology. In respect of statistical significance, this survey base is well in excess of 10% of the worldwide user base of high-end mainframe computers.

The survey reveals significant concerns around mainframe skills, barriers to modernization of core applications and the associated business risk this lack of agility creates.

Barriers to innovation

When a company’s core applications run Intel architectures, using the Linux operating system, the door is open to a world of Open-Source innovation. The effort across a range of open source projects, aimed at altering the fundamental trajectory of modern application development, is quite remarkable. This energy and innovation is almost entirely absent on mainframes.

So, it’s easy to understand why 96% of global IT leaders say Open-Source is strategic to future development and 71% say the mainframe is holding them back from innovation.

A looming skills crisis

Over 80% were concerned about lack of skills within their mainframe organization, and a staggering 56% said they had no succession plan for mainframe skills. The looming lack of mainframe-skilled IT professionals represents a major risk to many traditional business. These mainframe systems are often mission critical – almost all financial transactions touch a mainframe at some point in their journey. Without the skills in place to support them, these fundamental areas of the business could be in serious jeopardy in the near future.

A significant risk to business

77% of respondents believe they should have already started their mainframe modernization process to avoid being at risk.

This risk has two dimensions. Firstly, running core applications on a platform with a dwindling supply of skilled support personnel; when things go wrong, who are you going to call?

Secondly, borne on the web companies, with none of this mainframe baggage, can simply out-innovate their competitors. And a in a rapidly digitalizing world, this matters.

The tipping point

It is clear the individuals in the survey are aware of the broader implications of keeping legacy applications on a mainframe.

Yet for many, procrastination has set in. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place; they know they have to move, but the skills and technology required to make the move has been sadly lacking.

But the day of reckoning is coming. As pretty soon the skills shortage is going to bite hard, and the inability to innovate on these core applications will cost these companies real revenue.

 

 

Over two thirds of IT decision makers feel unable to innovate due to the inflexibility of their legacy mainframe

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Current mainframe skill set will not be sufficient to meet business needs, says 59 percent of respondents 

Zurich, 11 October 2018 – LzLabs and Microsoft today announced the results of a global survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne, which revealed that 94 percent of IT decision makers would consider moving off the mainframe due to the high cost and inflexibility that it brings to their business. Three quarters also agreed that they should have already started a mainframe migration process to future proof their business to stay competitive in their industry and address their growing mainframe skills gap.

A key factor in the respondents’ decision to move away from legacy mainframes was the need to innovate. The survey revealed a strong appetite for the adoption of modern innovative technologies across all sectors, with cloud deployment (85%) and open source (96%) being cited as playing a key role in future IT initiatives. However, over two thirds of respondents said that the inflexibility (71%) and cost (69%) of their mainframe is limiting the ability of their IT department to achieve this innovation.

“What we are seeing here is a tipping point for the future of the mainframe environment within organisations” said Thilo Rockmann, Chairman and COO of LzLabs. “Decades of procrastination have led to a situation where businesses are now shackled by the extreme cost and inflexibility of their legacy systems, rendering them unable to keep pace with more agile competitors in their industries.

“What these results show is a realisation within organisations that their dependence on the mainframe has gone on long enough, the time for procrastination is over, and the countdown clock to their mainframe exit is ticking.”

Mainframe skills – who are you going to call?

The survey also showed that the specialist skills required to maintain business-critical mainframe applications were a dwindling resource in organisations, with the vast majority of respondents (81%) expressing concern over the lack of mainframe skills within their IT team.

In their efforts to mitigate the skills gap, respondents had resorted to outsourcing almost a third (32%) of their mainframe workforce on average, a practice which has only added to the overall cost of the mainframe to the business.

Results also revealed that the consequences of the skills gap are rapidly approaching, with 59 percent of respondents stating that the current levels of skills in their mainframe management team will not be sufficient to meet their business requirements in the next five years.

Additional statistics highlighted:

  • 56 percent of respondents believe that their organisation has not properly implemented a succession plan for younger employees to absorb the knowledge required to maintain legacy mainframe architectures.
  • On average, respondents reported that they expected their organisation’s IT modernisation process to take at least three years.

“The price organisations are paying to prop up their legacy mainframes would be unjustifiable in any other corner of the business, and with a rapidly dwindling level of skills needed to keep the mainframe afloat, organisations are simply papering over the cracks with expensive outsourcing” said Mark Cresswell, CEO of LzLabs.

“With major c-level executives losing their jobs due to poor IT migrations, the legacy modernisation process must be done right, and it must be done now, to avoid the imminent and costly consequences of doing nothing”, he added.

“This should be a wakeup call for organisations that if they do not begin the process of migrating off the mainframe, they will continue to prohibit vital business innovation whilst paying a hefty financial sum for the privilege. The next two years are a crucial timeframe in for businesses to prevent the inevitability of being too far behind the competition to survive”.

Chris Dial, Director One Commercial Partner Group ISV, Western Europe, said: “Modern technologies such as the cloud are the driver of digital transformation. The Cloud enables companies and organizations not only to work more efficiently, but also to create new value-added products and services that can improve the customer experience while opening up new revenue streams.  We are excited to work with ISVs like LzLabs who are leading the way in modernizing apps and data to deliver more capabilities and insights to our joint customers.”  

Independent market research firm Vanson Bourne surveyed 500 IT decision makers in organisations across the UK, USA, Canada, France and DACH regions across industry verticals such as financial services, telecoms, IT, government and public sector.

What does the Power of Open mean?

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8 October 2018

Dale Vecchio, CMO, LzLabs

At LzLabs, what we call the Power of Open is at the core of everything we do. It’s about allowing customers to move from legacy proprietary environments, to ones in which they can leverage the innovation of the open-source community and the economics of modern technologies. For a long period, open-source development was not deemed to be worthy of organizational IT. But times change, and as John Maynard Keynes said: “when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do?”

Our aim is to enable customers to move mainframe systems into a new world of innovation, enabled by open technologies, which is critical to compete with any born on the web company. Would you want to depend on the innovation of a handful of mainframe vendors, who are more interested in preserving their maintenance revenue stream than anything else? Or would you rather fuel your business on the constantly growing world of innovation coming from the global open-source community?

The facts have changed, and it’s time to change with them.

The first pillar of the Power of Open is the belief in community – a belief that is shared by Generations Y and Z, the current and next generation of the IT workforce. It’s this belief in community that has created the massive scale of open-source. This world is home to the world’s most talented developers, who are able to prove and develop their skills by downloading free text editors, compilers, debuggers and testing tools – this approach is simply not possible in the mainframe world. The number of people in the mainframe community are dwarfed by those in the open-source community by any measure one chooses.

The second pillar is innovation. When development capacity is available from around the world rather than just inside a corporate IT department, or a single software vendor, innovation accelerates. This then attracts more talent and more innovation. This is why open-source software has become the dominant model for technologies such as web servers, big data, analytics, mobile development, and cloud infrastructure – none of these came from the mainframe world! If businesses could stop worrying about IT complexities, think how they could innovate, transform application systems, and respond rapidly to market competition instead of propping up their fragile infrastructure. Open-source and the cloud give businesses the freedom to embrace innovation.

And finally, demographics is destiny! – Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy is quoted as saying “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”. The fact that the mainframe workforce is retiring is an important worry, but a more important one is that the smartest people not only work for someone else, they are also not working on the mainframe platform.

Combining the inevitability of the demographic shift with the changing philosophies of younger generations, it’s easy to understand how a prediction of the decline of the mainframe came to be, and it’s easy to see why we chose the Power of Open as our core philosophy and the basis for the Software Defined Mainframe.

Far beyond just programmers tinkering in their bedrooms, the open-source world has created some of the most important foundational technologies for modern computing. OpenStack, PostgreSQL, and Red Hat’s OpenShift and Ceph Storage are all open-source creations that we utilise to enable the high reliability, availability, and serviceability of a mainframe environment, but on a platform that is open and flexible to future innovation at a fraction of the cost. Open-source databases for example allow businesses to move away from the mainframe datatypes that are difficult to integrate with modern analytics platforms, enabling cost-effective real-time analytics which is fundamental to achieving the innovation I mentioned earlier. If you’re interested in how this works, we explain how these technologies combine to create a resilient, future-proof environment for mainframe workloads in this whitepaper.

I don’t suggest the mainframe is dead, nor do I suggest that the modern mainframe is not more advanced than the original version. But in the IT world, the times they are a-changing, and it’s now impossible to ignore the benefits of open-source alternatives to the mainframe. The cloud is dramatically impacting the competitive landscape across all verticals, and this environment is based on open-source innovation.

Acceptance of the open-source community is the future. Accept it, or ignore it at your peril.

 

LzLabs teams up with Amazon Web Services to deliver legacy mainframe applications in the cloud

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Cooperation provides additional cloud deployment options for LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® customers

Zurich, 20 September 2018 – LzLabs today announced that it is teaming up with leading cloud services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable additional cloud delivery options for the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® (SDM). As a new Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), LzLabs will offer customers the option to move their legacy mainframe applications and data seamlessly to Linux platforms on the AWS cloud.

The cooperation will enable LzLabs customers to liberate legacy applications from the shackles of mainframe environments, without recompilation or reformatting of data, and experience the flexibility, scalability and reliability benefits of the AWS cloud. Customers re- hosting applications from legacy mainframe systems to the AWS cloud will be supported by both LzLabs and AWS throughout, ensuring a smooth transition.

The SDM is a managed customer application container technology that provides the capabilities for mainframe applications to execute on open systems, with no requirement for recompilation or conversion of data types. An SDM provides a runtime environment that supports the necessary functionally-equivalent subsystem APIs to enable transparent execution of the binary representations of these programs and data. Running in open environments, these applications are more easily integrated with mobile, IoT, cloud and DevOps strategies, and no longer require management by a diminishing mainframe workforce.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is the global partner program for AWS, focused on helping APN Partners build successful AWS-based businesses or solutions by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support.

“We are excited to work with AWS to provide our customers a comprehensive cloudexperience when liberating their mainframe applications “ said Thilo Rockmann, Chairman and COO of LzLabs. “Modern cloud platforms offer all the reliability, availability and serviceability traits associated with the mainframe. For this reason, our customers expect us to offer rehosting options with their chosen cloud service provider. When migrating their applications to a Software Defined Mainframe in the cloud, customers will be able to place their trust in the AWS platform to deliver a dependable and seamless experience.”

LzLabs and StarQuest Team Up to Deliver Rapid Database Access for Software Defined Mainframe Customers

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Partnership enables seamless mainframe data access for customers’ external applications during migration to SDM

Zurich, 29 August 2018 – LzLabs announced today that it is collaborating with StarQuest Ventures to seamlessly connect external applications to mainframe data rehosted on the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® (SDM).

Using Starquest technology, LzLabs enables customers to connect other business applications to their data within LzRelational™ on the SDM via standard protocols such as Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA), Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). This process ensures continuity of business process during and after the rehosting of mainframe applications and data to the SDM.

The SDM provides a platform to run mainframe applications on Linux, on-premise or in the cloud. The SDM runtime supports the execution of customer legacy applications, without recompilation or reformatting of data, while utilising enterprise-class Linux and other open technologies to provide a best-in-class operation environment. Mainframe legacy COBOL or PL/I applications are moved to a managed container architecture, that is designed to preserve business logic within the executable.

The StarSQL driver uses open industry standards to deliver rapid access to DRDA compliant databases such as LzRelationalTM – LzLabs’ relational database implementation based onthe open-source PostgreSQL. StarSQL implements unique, built-in memory management,collapsed protocol layers, and minimal data transfer, to provide the industry’s fastest remotedata access.

Paul Rampel, CEO and Founder of StarQuest Ventures, said: “Our solutions enable ourcustomers to escape vendor lock-in and connect their data to the environments and

applications that best meet their needs. Our partnership with LzLabs on its Software Defined Mainframe® is a perfect fit, and we’re delighted to be a part of this innovative approach to enterprise application management.”

“With the StarSQL driver, we can facilitate rapid integration with LzLabs Software DefinedMainframe for customers seeking to rehost applications and associated data from mainframeto open systems,” said Mark Cresswell, CEO of LzLabs. “This solution offers companies analternative that embraces modernisation without sacrificing existing value. LzLabs and StarQuest are aligned in our mission to help customers unlock their applications and data to the power of open systems, and escape costly vendor lock-in.”