As computing technology gains in speed and network agility, “old and well-known” mainframes need to keep up. And that’s what is happening now in a world of cloud, mobile, and open-source technology, according to Greg Lotko (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of the Mainframe Division at Broadcom Inc., which designs, develops and supplies semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions.

“It’s fabulous that the mainframe has I/O rates and throughput that no other platform can match, but if you can’t connect that to the transactions that the customer is driving to it, then you’re not leveraging the value,” Lotko said. “So, you really have to think about it from a perspective of how you open up everything you possibly can on the mainframe while preserving that security.”

Lotko spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed the intersection between the mainframe and an open approach, how DevOps fit into this world, and Broadcom’s position in this market following its CA Technologies Inc. acquisition in 2018. (* Disclosure below.)

Connecting to multicloud architecture

As the modern enterprise relies on an increasingly hybrid and multicloud IT architecture, the mainframe must connect through and to all of this, according to Lotko. Broadcom sees the cloud in a much more expansive way and the mainframe as an integral part of that.

“We think about the customer’s cloud environment — the institution that we are dealing with, say it’s a financial institution, to their end customers, their cloud is however you interact,” he said. “If you’re checking an account balance, if you’re depositing in a check … you’re probably picking up a mobile device or a PC [and] you’re dealing with an edge server, you’re going back into distributed servers, and you’re eventually interacting with the mainframe, and then that’s got to come all the way back out to you.”

The open approach of the mainframe must be wide, according to Lotko. “Open is also about opening up the [application program interfaces], opening up the connectivities, so that it’s easier to interact with the platform,” he explained. “Sometimes people think open is just about dealing with open source.”

When opening the APIs, it is possible to bring several capabilities to the mainframe and embrace DevOps, Lotko explained.

“We had a large European retail bank that actually used the Git Bridge that we work with — providing through Zowe — to connect into Endevor so they could leverage all the investments they had made in that existing technology over the years,” Lotko explained. “But [they] actually use the same kind of continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline, the same interaction that they do across distributed platforms and mainframe together, and open up that experience across their development community.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE