Blog Post for Broadcom Mainframe Software by Eric Newcomer
The computing landscape has broadened significantly in recent years, with many more types and styles of computers powering new business processes, resulting in the need for organizations to redesign and modernize their existing systems.
IT managers must evaluate and choose the right platform (or platforms) for modernization projects, considering a variety of options, including mainframes, distributed computing architectures, cloud computing, and mobile platforms. They must evaluate all options carefully to identify the overall approach that will produce the best results.
Among the challenges is finding the best way to incorporate new technologies and capabilities to a typically already complex mix, such as new APIs to support mobile and web applications, gen AI agents and chat bots to improve productivity, and new database options for time sensitive analytics, AI vectors, and global visibility.
Top Trends for 2026
Regarding the overall industry context for incorporating new capabilities, Gartner[1] and Infotech[2] recently released lists of top strategic technology trends for 2026. Reflecting the rapid pace of change, both lists highlight the importance of investing in AI, security, and regulatory compliance.
Significant IT budget pressures remain, however, due to economic and business fluctuations, and it can be difficult to prioritize modernization projects to incorporate new technologies, especially when trying to demonstrate ROI for projects that may not be production ready yet.
Foundational requirements also continue to put pressure on budgets for improving the capture, storage, and processing of the increasing volumes of transactional and unstructured data for compliance, regulatory approval, decision support, and generative AI.
Harnessing such data for generative AI and agentic AI rank among the top competitive issues today, just above related requirements for delivering intuitive and responsive user interfaces, which depend on the performance and resilience of back-end transaction processing systems.
New computing and connectivity methodologies to meet new strategic requirements do not necessitate replacing existing systems, however. In fact, the opposite is often true: new features and capabilities often can be added to existing systems to enable new types of user interactions and to meet growing compliance and security requirements.
Data remains key across the board, however, both in terms of volume and quality. Increasing volumes of data can flood any existing IT landscape as each new technology and capability adds to the flow. The ability to process, store, and monetize operational data is one of the constant and primary ways to measure success for any strategic IT investment.
New Technologies for Existing Systems
Rather than replace existing systems as part of a modernization effort, it often makes more sense to update them to new versions, instead.
Adding new technologies that complement and extend existing systems is often less expensive and produces more business value for the investment involved than entirely replacing them.
A fundamental part of planning for introducing new, modern capabilities is conducting a basic assessment to ensure all hardware and software is up to date, at least as much as possible, and working as well as possible. It’s important to start with a baseline of optimized, well-functioning existing systems as the baseline for designing a modernization project.
A weak link in the interconnected chain of application support systems can inhibit performance, degrade reliability and resilience, and impact customer satisfaction and retention. A modernization project is not usually the right way to fix broken fundamental system characteristics.
An assessment of such characteristics is essential for planning purposes because it provides a coherent view of the current environment and identifies where upgrades and updates may be needed. The assessment of the current baseline identifies where and how modernization will improve the existing environment.
Different platforms in the landscape have different characteristics that are important to consider when evaluating them for modernization project readiness. Cloud based systems typically provide continuous upgrades and improvements that are relatively simple to adopt, for example.
Distributed systems, such as Linux and Windows, often require specific programs and investments to keep them current, such as continuous monitoring, version upgrades, and patching.
Mainframes are often an integral part of the IT landscape, too, and tend to have specialized maintenance and upgrade processes. It’s well worth the time and effort required as part of any modernization project to check whether your mainframe hardware is up to date, and the software is up to date, including the capabilities required to participate in the overall IT landscape of APIs, integrations, data lakes, regulatory compliance, generative AI, and so on.
You may not have any explicit requirements for modern mainframe capabilities, but these requirements can be inferred or deduced from the requirements for modernizing the distributed and cloud-based systems. Mainframe hardware and software have been evolving to keep pace with industry trends, and often offers capabilities based on innovations originally developed for other environments.
It’s important to invest in keeping mainframes up to date, because as much as there’s a benefit of investing, there’s also a penalty for not investing. Not investing appropriately in your mainframe platform when modernizing distributed and cloud-based systems can inhibit or reduce the ability to achieve new strategic goals across the landscape.
Don’t wait for the day when a business sponsor comes to you in a panic and says, “we need to adopt APIs now to allow web access to this mainframe data or run this LLM” and you are so far behind in your staffing, hardware, software, and practices that you can’t give the access. You can avoid this — the data and methods are there. Sometimes when people think a mainframe is old, it’s just under managed and not up to date.
If you need any help with mainframe modernization questions, consider contacting Broadcom Mainframe Software about their expertise and software products.
The Intellyx Take
When planning a modernization project to support a new or upgraded user experience, or to put in place a generative AI productivity enhancement, it’s essential to look across the entire IT landscape – mainframes, distributed systems, cloud systems, and mobile and web apps.
Many applications travers significant parts of the landscape. An API for a new mobile app for example typically includes work for the two major mobile operating systems (Android and iOS), and API gateway and integration software on distributed systems, and a transactional database on a mainframe.
Assessing the capabilities and performance of existing systems is an essential foundation to planning a modernization project. Making sure what’s in place is performing as expected and needed is essential when figuring out what new things you want to include.
Be sure to check with your hardware and software vendors, such as Broadcom Mainframe Software for example, to ensure everything in your current environment is ready to take on the next big step.
Copyright © Intellyx B.V. Broadcom Mainframe Software is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to write this content. Image by Broadcom Mainframe Software.
[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/top-technology-trends-2026
[2] https://www.infotech.com/research/ss/tech-trends-2026
