In the News > United Kingdom

Pressure is mounting from various sides on those customers that are still using apps that are stuck on aging mainframes.

Those customers running business critical apps on mainframes are just a few years away from a deep skills crisis that could leave them struggling. 

A looming wave of retirements means that many of those with the skills and knowledge of existing legacy mainframes are not far from leaving the business at a time when firms are keen to get access to their data as part of wider digital transformation efforts. 

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Zurich-based software company LzLabs has signed an alliance agreement with professional services firm KPMG UK to offer advisory, risk and deal consultancy – and a shot at the coveted cloud market.

As part of the deal, KPMG will bring its advisory capabilities while LzLabs has its Software Defined Mainframe (SDM). The latter is designed to let customer legacy applications run unchanged on both Linux hardware and cloud infrastructures.

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Enterprises seeking to modernize their legacy mainframe applications often cite the key reason as not being able to evolve quickly enough to support the changing needs of the business. This is also a driving force behind the increasing trend toward moving these legacy applications onto other platforms, either by attempting to rewrite or re-platform them.

If this was a simple process however, the transition would have happened years ago. So, why is it so difficult to modernize mainframe applications? It is surely not the programming language. COBOL and other traditional languages are simply programming languages. They may not be considered “cool,” but neither are many of the other scripting or development languages, or configuration syntax programmers deal with day in and day out.

So, what actually makes legacy application modernization challenging? After countless conversations with several outsourcers, system integrators and mainframe customers, four major issues came up time and time again.

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Mainframe replacement is a phrase that turns the blood to ice in the veins of most telecoms IT professionals but these ambitious projects are starting to happen with greater regularity as mainframes reach their fourth – and sometimes fifth – decade of operation and the cost of operating them starts outstrip the risk associated with replacement. VanillaPlus managing editor George Malim recently interviewed Markus Tschumper, the head of general IT services at Swisscom, to learn about the communications service provider’s recent migration of traditional mainframe workloads to the cloud, running on a software defined mainframe from LzLabs.

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Similar to the ‘chicken or the egg’ debate, many organisations question whether to start modernising the application, whilst still on the mainframe, or moving applications off their legacy infrastructure first: moving then improving.

It can, of course, be tempting to take a look at these applications, running in a stable fashion on a platform that has been ticking over consistently for years… and conclude that this is where they should belong. After all, wouldn’t the process of trying to move them off just make the job harder?

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