The venerable mainframe computer is experiencing a surprising but well-deserved resurgence, as the organizations that depend on these systems realize how important they are for digital initiatives and for hybrid information technology strategies in general.

IBM Corp. – the sole remaining purveyor of mainframe systems – continues to invest in the platform, and Big Blue’s latest iteration, the z14 (pictured), is a masterpiece of scalability, reliability and security, as is its core operating system, z/OS.

The mainframe’s technology may be cutting-edge, but its problems are very human: a generational shift as older mainframers retire, requiring a new cadre of professionals, and the fact that mainframe teams are still largely siloed, since working on z/OS requires a largely specialized skillset.

The solution: an open-source framework that brings modern tools, technologies and software development approaches including DevOps to mainframes running z/OS.

Welcome to Zowe.

Introducing Zowe

Open-source frameworks are nothing new in the distributed computing world, but for the mainframe, such a project is downright radical.

Zowe (pronounced zoh-wee) is a project of the Linux Foundation. According to the Linux Foundation, the new open-source software framework allows developers to use modern tools and technologies on mainframe systems running z/OS. It was the result of collaboration among IBM, Rocket Software Inc. and Broadcom Inc. within the umbrella of the foundation’s Open Mainframe Project. (* Disclosure below.)

Broadcom, via its recent acquisition of CA Technologies, and Rocket Software have long been IBM partners, but this collaboration is markedly different from the traditional partner relationships in the mainframe world. “There was still vendor lock-in to the stack, so we wanted other ISVs to participate in what we were doing and they said, ‘I’m not going to do that because of IBM,’” explained Joe Winchester, senior technical staff member at IBM. “They would say IBM owns a piece of the technology stack, so we’re not going to play with you because even though you’re really friendly today we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Today, independent software vendors such as Rocket Software are singing a different tune. “We all love IBM Z, but we’ve also seen other platforms accelerate in growth because they’ve embraced open source,” explained Andy Youniss, president and chief executive officer of Rocket Software. “More and more mainframe users and mainframe clients were waiting for the day IBM Z would finally be open, too.” 

The broader software community understands the power of open source, and Zowe takes advantage of its strengths to ensure adoption, in spite of leveraging a single-vendor platform. “We don’t want somebody that has a commercial product with open source underneath to see that as some sort of weakness in terms of if an issue comes with a commercial product that’s found in the open source,” said Winchester. “How can they deliver that and have the same warranty that’s a commercial product set on top of the providers, so that’s something we’re addressing.”

Driving community collaboration

For open-source efforts to succeed, they must include participation among users as well as vendors – and in the case of Zowe, users who are not only traditional mainframe people. “How do we do this to help bring a greater audience and drive industry collaboration to provide a way for partners, customers, and other key vendors in the space to all work together to all help share a common goal of providing a modern framework for interacting with the mainframe?” asked John Mertic, director of program management at the the Linux Foundation.

One way to spread the Zowe love is via a competition such as IBM’s Master the Mainframe competition that has attracted tens of thousands of college students annually. “Many have never worked with mainframes before, but they find the technology surprisingly accessible,” Youniss said. “The key advance with Zowe is that you don’t have to be a mainframer to work on IBM Z. By bringing mainframes into the realm of open source and making mainframe coding in syntax more familiar to today’s software engineers, Zowe helps democratize the mainframe.”

One of the participants in this competition, Usman Haider, a lecturer at NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Pakistan and alumnus of the Open Mainframe Project internship program, had positive comments about this competition. “I really like the idea about the contest, because it gives you a hands-on experience,” Haider said. “It gives you access to the platform in a way that you don’t get. You don’t get access to Z/OS or the mainframe. For example, Linux architecture or the x86 machines are everywhere, but the Z systems or the mainframe systems are very hard to find.”

Haider’s excitement centers on areas of innovation on the mainframe such as artificial intelligence and the “internet of things.” “I have seen technologies at the open-source summit, the machine learning things on the IBM platforms, the speech to text things and the image recognition things on the IBM mainframe platforms,” he added. “So I really see mainframe growing in these two fields.”

DevOps on the mainframe

Bringing younger people up to speed on the mainframe is one part of Zowe’s strategy. Establishing the framework as a first-class DevOps tool is another. “DevOps teams can only move as fast as their slowest digital asset,” explained Chris O’Malley, president and CEO of Compuware. “As such, precious mainframe code and data must continue to leverage the platform’s inherent strengths and quality requirements while keeping pace with the need for speed in innovation.”

Zowe is rising to this challenge. “If you look at what people want from DevOps, they want to be able to hook up Jenkins and Git and all of these tools out there that people understand,” Winchester added. “They’re evolving very fast and they want to attach all of these and dock them around the main space from an operational and development point of view. That’s a challenge that’s being faced now.”

Furthermore, adding Zowe to a DevOps toolchain is free and relatively straightforward. “Using things like task runners, having access to automated test tools, bringing mainframe into CI/CD pipelines — this is true open source and anyone can go ahead and start using it at no cost,” explained Rose Sakach, a product manager at Broadcom. “The process is extremely transparent. You can see what’s going on both with the vendors contributing or individual contributors, and we have customers that are struggling with ‘OK, what use case is best for us, so where do we begin?’”

The fact that Zowe is open source is also important to the DevOps crowd. “Your typical DevOps audience is used to looking at tools like Gradle and Puppet and things like that,” Mertic noted. “They know that they’re not only the users but they’re contributors to it. We want to be really clear here: Definitely use it, but part of this being open source is so that you have a seat at the table, directing where this goes.”

The win for the business

Technology innovation is wonderful, but without clear business value, it amounts to little more than polishing shiny things. Given the platform’s history, the mainframe crowd is especially aware of this reality. “What Zowe allows both end users and developers to do is enable a newer generation of users and developers to have access to all the critical data within all these financial, retail and insurance systems living on the mainframe,” says Anjali Arora, senior vice president of research and development and chief product officer at Rocket Software. “Bear in mind, the mainframe is still powering mission-critical applications including banking transactions. The mainframe is not going away. It is better to bring the new generation to the mainframe than try to move the critical data elsewhere.”

For many members of the project, Zowe means more than bringing the mainframe to the broader technology world. It’s also a reaffirmation of the value of the platform itself. “We have this great platform that does so much heavy lifting for the world. It’s extremely secure and it processes things faster than anything else,” said Greg Lotko, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s mainframe division. “We’ve all been searching for ways to have others see the light and understand what it is we know.”

Zowe is less than a year old, so it has a ways to go yet. But given the commitment of project members coupled with interest from the broader tech community, its prospects are bright. As Zowe goes, so too goes the mainframe itself: Once hidebound and siloed, it’s now a fully modern component of hybrid IT for the foreseeable future.

(*Disclosure: Broadcom, Compuware and IBM are Intellyx customers, and Rocket Software is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer.)

Jason Bloomberg, a leading IT industry analyst, author, keynote speaker and globally recognized expert on multiple disruptive trends in enterprise technology and digital transformation, is founder and president of agile digital transformation analyst firm Intellyx. The firm advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps suppliers communicate their agility stories. Bloomberg, who can be followed on Twitter and LinkedIn, is also the author or coauthor of four books, including “The Agile Architecture Revolution.”

Photo: IBM