Dating from 1955, SHARE was the first enterprise information technology user group back when mainframes were the only game in town. Today, 68 years later, SHARE is still going strong, as it transforms itself to support a new generation of mainframe professionals.

The crowd at this week’s SHARE conference in New Orleans nevertheless had its share of grizzled veterans who euphemistically call themselves “late-tenure.” Though “new tenure,” aka younger mainframers, were in short supply in the halls of the New Orleans Hyatt Regency, their recruitment, training and continued employment were top of mind among vendors and enterprise end-users alike.

The reason that new tenure mainframers are so important, of course, is because the mainframe itself remains essential to the hundreds of enterprises that depend upon the venerable platform. Far from being a legacy technology, the IBM Z platform (pictured) is fully modern, forming the crux of many enterprise’s AI, Linux and cloud-native strategies.

As a result, the buzz at SHARE is an odd mix of old and new. Conversations were just as likely to center on discussions of 40-year-old tooling as running AI workloads on the new IBM Telum Processor.

Among all the back and forth, three topics emerged as the central themes of SHARE. Here’s a summary:

Hot topic No. 1: modernization

Modernization is always a hot topic in mainframe circles – modernization of applications, infrastructure, architectures, development processes and tooling.

What’s missing from this list: modernization of the platform itself. There are certainly some companies with older mainframes that could do with a new one, but nobody was talking about that.

The focus of the application modernization discussions centered on updating and rewriting older code – a task that mainframers of the past shied away from. In the old days, nobody wanted to mess with ancient applications, for fear of breaking them. Today, better tools and processes are empowering developers to chip away at ancient code monoliths, updating business logic while also moving to modern microservices architectures.

One important tool for slicing through the Gordian knot of legacy code is BMC AMI DevX Code Analysis. With this tool, developers can understand complex mainframe code quickly. Even new-tenure developers can use this tool to poke through old code, updating and troubleshooting it regardless of its complexity.

Rocket Software Inc. also offers a suite of tools that focus on modernization without disruption. The company offers low-code and no-code development tools for seasoned developers and novices alike, supporting modern continuous integration and delivery, or CI/CD, practices for mainframe development.

In fact, the move to DevOps also represents an important modernization trend, both for tooling as well as software development processes. DevOps requires automation as well as greater collaboration across the development, infrastructure, testing and operations teams.

With the increasing prevalence of the new-tenure mainframers, such processes and tools are essential for attracting and maintaining the new generation of mainframe professional.

Hot topic No. 2: resilience

Traditionally, mainframes lived in secure, walled gardens, offering dramatic levels of availability and reliability — many mainframes have been in production for years with absolutely zero downtime.

Today, the gardens are gone, replaced by clouds. Preventing problems, while still a priority, is secondary to resilience – being able to recover quickly from any issues that do occur.

Two primary forces of change were driving the resilience discussion at SHARE. The first is ransomware. Organizations are painfully aware that even with the best-laid plans, a ransomware attack may get through even the mainframe’s robust defenses.

Recovering from ransomware attacks, therefore, is the focus. Mainframe-based organizations are retiring their older tape-based backup systems in favor of cloud-based immutable object storage. Reducing the mean time to restore is top priority, as organizations figure out ways to recover only those datasets that ransomware corrupted.

Restoring only those datasets that are necessary for the problem at hand – aka “surgical recovery” – is an important capability. The Rocket Backup and Recovery Manager Suite, in conjunction with Dell storage hardware running Dell z Data Protection, gives mainframe-based companies the ability to recover datasets at the individual volume level using snapshots for selective dataset recovery.

The second primary motivation for resilience that was a hot topic at the conference was the Digital Operational Resilience Act, or DORA, set to go into effect in Europe in January 2024. European organizations – financial firms in particular – will now be required by regulation to implement comprehensive resilience strategies.

Given the central role the mainframe plays in the global financial ecosystem, DORA is top of mind for all European mainframe organizations. With similar regulation in progress around the world, resilience is unquestionably a hot topic.

Hot topic No. 3: fun

Only the most hardcore of late-tenure mainframers might actually think mainframes are fun, right? To attract and retain the next generation of new-tenure professionals, the answer must be a resounding “No.”

Although any mainframe-based organization can recruit techies out of college with the lure of a generous salary, the only way to retain them is to give them a reasonable career path combined with fun work. Rosalind Radcliffe, a well-known mainframe thought leader, IBM Fellow and CIO DevSecOps CTO, made this point succinctly. “We’ve got to be bringing joy to our work,” she said.

Modern tools are a must. Old-fashioned green screen terminals are a sign of a dead-end job and are seriously lacking in fun. Modern processes and culture are also essential.

In other words, DevOps on the mainframe is critically important, not just for delivering better software more quickly, but also for upskilling and retaining younger mainframe professionals. “DevOps lets us do the fun stuff,” Radcliffe said.

SHARE’s next 60 years

The broader context for fun extends the collaboration-based culture of DevOps to all corners of the mainframe organization.

For its part, SHARE is casting its net as widely as possible with a greater focus on its online learning catalog, a shift to individual memberships that professionals can take with themselves from job to job, and an increasing focus on diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI.

As the late-tenure mainframers retire and the new tenure professionals take over, casting as wide a net as possible to bring in fresh blood to the mainframe world will continue to be central to SHARE’s mission.

DEI, in fact, is the best antidote to the “grizzled veteran” trend that so many mainframe organizations face. Increasing opportunities for women, minorities and people of all ages will help keep mainframes alive for decades to come.

Jason Bloomberg is founder and managing partner of Intellyx, which advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. Disclosure: BMC and IBM are Intellyx customers. Rocket Software is a former Intellyx customer.

Image: IBM