Cloud computing has enabled unprecedented technology expansion and data proliferation, but not every workload was created to thrive off-premises. As enterprises explores custom solutions for the complex data sets that drive business strategy, the industry is seeing a revival of reliable, cost-efficient mainframe technology as a hub for hybrid cloud.

Greg Lotko (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of the Mainframe Division at Broadcom Inc., and Clayton Donley (pictured, left), head of security and integration at Broadcom, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed the value of on-premises infrastructure in hybrid strategy and how Broadcom is supporting streamlined multicloud in the wake of its CA Technologies acquisition at the end of 2018. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: You don’t have to kill the old to bring in the new; there’s a great abstraction around software now that’s making them work together. But the new stuff works really great. Your thoughts on this?

Lotko: There’s a stat that 75 percent of the large enterprises in the world say they’ll have multicloud or hybrid environments by 2020. I think they all have it today. There are not workloads that work in isolation. You pick up your phone and check your balance; it’s going to kick off a transaction to an edge device that’s going to go through a network and maybe hit another server. Eventually, it’s going back to a mainframe.

You want that interaction for the developers to be common across those platforms, yet you want them to be able to leverage the security of the underlying platform without having to know all the gory details — which is why it makes a lot of sense to use mainframe and distributed. If you look across the CA Technologies portfolio that Broadcom acquired, a lot of the capabilities that we have are the same capabilities that work across those environments so that the enterprise customers can interact with it one way.

Miniman: How do I protect my data [in a] more heterogeneous world?

Donley: Each transaction has to be protected. The [application programming interface] that gives you the ability to call that transaction from a mobile app needs to be protected. Then you need to be able to orchestrate that [the] same way every time, testing them the same way every time. Our value in digital infrastructure management [is] bringing all these pieces in cloud, multicloud, mainframe, [so] you have a way to operate [and] manage it, as well as for security.

Miniman: Figuring out management of a heterogeneous environment has typically been a downfall. How how is the industry helping to solve that issue?

Lotko: It’s fundamentally realizing that the core large enterprises in the world today are using mainframes. You’re going to have these systems interacting, and you recognize that we have to make it easier for people to interact. It’s what’s informing everything we do in our strategy and mainframe. We talk about open, frictionless and optimized; it’s all about the idea that mainframe system and those processes that we’re running, whether it’s DevOps, databases and tools, security, analytics, has to be open and able to interact with other people’s tools [and] platforms.

You realize that this mainframe you’re spending 20 percent of your budget on is actually doing 70 percent of your processing — really cost effective. IBM had the mediation layer and we said, ‘If we got together, we could really start a renaissance around mainframe.’ We want our customers to find it easier to work with the mainframe and compete on the differentiation of underlying product, whether it be price or function.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: Broadcom Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Broadcom nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE