Keeping core business applications at pace with mainframe innovation

For over 60 years, mainframes have anchored industries such as banking, insurance, healthcare, retail and the public sector. All these industries require heavy-duty, low latency transaction processing. Mainframes are designed to provide mission-critical applications with reliable availability to ensure the costs and unacceptable impacts of downtime are avoided.

The advances in digital and cloud are placing all these industries in a place of transition and the last two years have accelerated this transformation. Based on a recent IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) survey, in collaboration with Oxford Economics, technology and business leaders say the mainframe not only remains an important part of their organizations’ IT platforms, it plays a central role in accelerating their digital transformation.

71% of executives say mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy. 

In the report, Application modernization on the mainframe executives from some of the largest and most successful businesses assert that mainframe and cloud are not either/or propositions. They are seamlessly intertwined in delivering cutting-edge, enterprise-wide agility and capability. And together they help secure operations, reduce latency and drive legacy processes to a higher levels of business agility.

Innovation is at the heart of the IBM® z16™, the newest single-frame and multi-frame systems that bring security, privacy and resiliency to your hybrid cloud. It helps businesses accelerate decision velocity by leveraging AI pervasively across the business with real-time inferencing at unprecedented speed and scale. The end-to-end encryption and quantum-safe technologies help create trust through data protection and privacy. A common IBM zSystems and cloud experience enables infrastructure optimization with secure, resilient and scalable technology on and off prem and a flexible infrastructure for the responsible enterprise to help deliver continuous service, automate compliance tasks and reduce carbon footprint.

How can businesses build on these new features, by integrating and extending mainframe capabilities to support agility and new business innovation?

The challenge is deciding which applications to modernize, determining how to modernize and identifying the destination for modernized applications. Successful companies with a vision for these elements are rapidly executing and capturing new value. 

Source: ibm.com