Contrary to what passes for popular wisdom these days, migrating enterprise applications off the mainframe is often a fool’s errand. That’s the word from the SHARE Conference, a confab by a venerable mainframe user group amazingly celebrating its sixtieth anniversary this year.
Here’s the scenario: the new CIO wants to shake things up and believes mainframes are obsolete. So he (or she) pares down the mainframe budget, shifting resources to a major migration effort, perhaps to the cloud. Only the migration runs into problems, costing far more than predicted. But there’s no going back, as the mainframe effort has been starved of necessary resources.
The problem is often in the IT organization’s executive ranks. “You always have reorganizations and executive management coming and going,” according to James Vincent, senior systems programmer at Nationwide Insurance and president of SHARE. Some executives are smart enough to rationally evaluate the total cost of ownership of the mainframe, while others are less savvy.
Such lack of savviness is putting a major automobile insurance company in jeopardy, for example. “Our CIO is our ‘Chief Ignorance Officer’,” quips one of their system developers, whose name I’ll keep confidential for obvious reasons.
In fact, for enterprises with mainframes, this venerable workhorse is both modern and cost-effective, as IBM (the sole remaining mainframe manufacturer) continues to invest heavily in their z Systems platform – and when compared to either on-premise distributed systems or the cloud, the mainframe usually compares favorably on cost, as well as performance and reliability.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/08/14/mainframe-migration-fools-errand/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, CA Technologies and Compuware are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned are Intellyx customers. Compuware covered Jason Bloomberg’s travel to the SHARE conference, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
