BrainBlog for IBM by Jason English
Looking at mainframe modernization in industries like insurance, automotive and retail.
When you think of the world’s biggest modernization challenges, you immediately think of banking, and for good reason. Banks were among the first to roll out advanced mobile apps some 15 years ago, and they had already started offering online services in the mid-1990s.
Well before that, banks were interacting through massive electronic payment gateways and operating mainframe services, many of which remain core to their business to this day even though the platforms themselves have evolved significantly since then.
Even if transactional systems that connect to a bank make up much of the mainframe landscape, they are part of a larger wave of transformation that isn’t only about banks. Mainframes are still an essential part of the digital backbone of many other industries, and there are still a lot more digital transformation stories left to be told that aren’t exclusively financially motivated.
Let’s explore some highlights of mainframe modernization in other industries, including insurance, automotive and retail.
It all starts with the customer
If there is one common pattern for mainframe modernization shared across all industries, it’s that companies are trying to improve their digital experience for customers without the risk of interrupting critical core systems.
The customer can be an end user on an app or website or an employee/partner in an office or in the field. Customers are evaluating the company based on how well the company’s business logic and data serve their experience. Customers don’t care if the back-end is a mainframe talking to a SaaS provider that offers a mobile app UI—they just want the whole system to meet their business needs efficiently and accurately.
Even in a machine learning scenario, where mainframe data may be informing an artificial intelligence (AI) model rather than a person, there’s still a customer who will want the resulting AI model to support a business process.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
