Some people believe the mainframe is obsolete – an ancient relic of 1960s computing. For others, it serves an important role as long as it sticks to its knitting, handling core transaction processing for banks and other large enterprises.

Take a closer look, however, and you’ll see the mainframe is an active platform for innovation, both by the vendors that develop its software and for mainframe customers that are finding a role for Big Iron in their cloud-native plans for innovation.

Mainframe incumbents make moves

As the sole remaining vendor of mainframe systems, IBM Corp. is largely responsible for the continued growth of its IBM Z mainframe product line (pictured). To open the door to innovation, Big Blue has been rationalizing and lowering mainframe pricing over the last few years, bringing the platform into cost alignment with cloud alternatives. (* Disclosure below.)

Making the platform more palatable, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. In truth, IBM is driving innovation on the mainframe in many areas.

Most notably, IBM has been rolling out IBM Wazi Developer for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, a cloud-native development experience for its venerable z/OS mainframe operating system. With Wazi, developers can use their IDE of choice to develop mainframe applications on the Red Hat OpenShift Container platform. “Wazi provides COBOL developers with exactly the same experience as Java or Node.js developers,” said Rosalind Radcliffe, chief architect for DevOps for z Systems at IBM, “both the tools experience and the way you write code.”

Another more surprising area of innovation for IBM on the mainframe: providing security for commercial cryptocurrency wallets.

Crypto private keys and the wallets that ostensibly hold them are notoriously vulnerable, as crypto owners have no recourse should their keys or wallet become compromised. For decentralized finance or DeFi vendors and other companies that do business with crypto, protecting their keys and their wallets is a mission-critical requirement. “You want to provide the accessibility of hot wallets with the security of cold wallets,” explained IBM Distinguished Engineer Rebecca Gott. “Hyperprotected virtual servers protect data in use.”

I also spoke to incumbent mainframe vendor BMC Software Inc., whose 2020 acquisition of mainframe tools vendor Compuware has bolstered its innovation story. Compuware had been focusing on mainstreaming the mainframe by bringing industry-leading DevOps processes and capabilities to the platform.

Now that BMC has fully integrated Compuware into its mainframe division, this DevOps-centricity is empowering innovation across its customer base. “The mainframe is no longer behind the curtain. It has to be mainstream,” says April Hickel, vice president for Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation at BMC. “The goal is to have the same DevOps pipeline for mainframe and the rest of development.”

Supporting innovation with mainframe improvements

In many cases, mainframe innovation focuses either on improving the core functionality of the platform or simplifying the tasks of integrating with or modernizing mainframe applications.

GT Software Inc., for example, addresses mainframe integration challenges by offering a secure abstraction layer between modern cloud applications and the mainframe. Furthermore, the company enables its customers to generate APIs via a no-code, drag-and-drop interface that further fosters innovation.

GT Software’s customers are generating top-line benefits with mainframe apps, for example, to support European open banking regulations. “Open banking in Europe started as a compliance challenge,” said GT Software President Alex Heublein. “Then the banks figured out they could monetize the data streams, improving customer stickiness and integrating with fintechs.”

Precisely Holdings, LLC, formed by the 2020 merger of Pitney Bowes’ software and data business with mainframe vendor Syncsort, has a long history of improving sorting algorithms on the mainframe. It continues this innovation today, working directly with IBM’s hardware team to optimize its algorithms. “The discussions were about exactly where the ‘bottlenecks’ were in sorting and how hardware can be used to accelerate that,” said John Reda, senior vice president of product management at Precisely. “The new hardware not only required a new algorithm to fully exploit, it required multiple trips to the IBM lab to test different prototypes.”

Mainframe startups: not an oxymoron

The mainframe is also seeing increased innovation among startups. For example, Model9 Ltd. migrates data off the mainframe to either cloud or on-premises storage. The migrated data are in an encrypted, native binary format. Once at their destination, Model9 transforms the data as necessary for analytics or backup purposes.

Model9 can replace tape or virtual tape for backup and restore, as it can return the native binaries to the mainframe if necessary. However, supporting various analytical use cases off the mainframe is Model9’s primary purpose.

Another startup, VirtualZ Computing Corp., redirects requests for mainframe applications to a single instance of that application in order to reduce licensing costs.

Lowering costs is only part of the VirtualZ value proposition. “VirtualZ leaves data where it is,” said Vince Re, co-founder and chief technology officer of VirtualZ Computing. “That frees us to virtualize the application, letting it run wherever makes the most sense — typically the lowest cost.”

In other words, VirtualZ can both lower the cost of mainframe applications as well as free them from the mainframe when it makes sense. “You want to choose a platform to meet the needs of the application,” Re continued. “Understand what the application’s needs are and make them available wherever it runs.”

Of all the mainframe startups, perhaps the most supportive of customer innovation is CloudFrame Inc. It converts COBOL to Java while maintaining functional parity between the COBOL and Java code. In other words, the resulting Java workloads can run on or off the mainframe without requiring any changes to legacy data, schedulers, CICS triggers or Db2 stored procedures.

One of the urgent problems CloudFrame addresses is the imminent deprecation of COBOL 4.2. IBM will soon end support for well-established COBOL 4.2, pushing its customers to COBOL 6.0. Just one problem: COBOL 6.0 is not fully backward-compatible, and thus customers that implement the upgrade risk breaking their mission-critical COBOL applications.

CloudFrame has an ingenious solution to this problem. Customers can transition their COBOL 4.2 programs to Java and run them just as they would have run the original programs – only without the need to run any COBOL 4.2.

In other words, CloudFrame gives customers time to decide what to do with their older COBOL programs. “Some customers have been using Micro Focus COBOL, but they want to ship Java to customers today and run it in the cloud tomorrow,” said Venkat Pillay, founder and chief executive of CloudFrame. In this way, customers can take their time to refactor or rewrite older applications in Java or COBOL 6 without the pressure to move off of COBOL 4.2 on a deadline.

The future of the mainframe

For decades, the mainframe has been in its own world, with its own team, tooling and way of thinking. The mainframe, however, is far from obsolete – but the old way of thinking about it certainly is.

Mainframe customers simply cannot afford to maintain this status quo. “Customers told us the mainframe couldn’t be the ‘platform of no,’” said BMC’s Hickel. “The ‘platform of no’ succumbs to the need to move faster as a result of competitive pressure.”

Instead, the world has to see the mainframe as just another server, one with special characteristics unique to the platform.  “We need to make mainframe apps a first-class participant in the new ecosystem,” said GT Software’s Heublein.

Much of the disruption in the mainframe world comes from the generational shift, as the old guard of mainframe specialists gives way to a younger crowd more comfortable in the modern distributed-computing world.

Making the mainframe accessible to this new generation is essential for innovation. “The stuff on the mainframe hasn’t been accessible. It’s been locked away,” VirtualZ’s Re explained. “And there aren’t enough people with skills.”

Hickel agreed. “The new people owning and operating the mainframe aren’t lifetime mainframe people,” she said. “They’re more likely to have cloud infrastructure backgrounds. The mainframe is an integral part of the infrastructure environment. The mainframe is just another computing platform. It’s plugged into the wall and plugged into the network just like every other server.”

Jason Bloomberg is founder and president of Intellyx, which publishes the Cloud-Native Computing Poster and advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. (* Disclosure: BMC and IBM are Intellyx customers. None of the other vendors mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. OpenShift®, Red Hat®, and z/OS® are registered trademarks of IBM.)

Photo: IBM