April 2018 marked the 54th anniversary of IBM’s mainframes. It is uncertain if anyone could have ever predicted such a long and successful life for them. A quick historical sketch: IBM launched the first modern mainframe, IBM 360, on April 7, 1964. With 229,000...
Based on estimates and benchmarks from Technavio and Gartner, the mainframe market—hardware and software—is worth about $44 billion a year. An estimated 90% of all credit and debit cards were still processed on the mainframe in 2017, and IBM continues to sell more...
The numbers are clear and compelling: Mainframe usage is on the rise: By this year, 64% of mainframe-powered organizations (up from 57% last year) will be running more than half of their business-critical workloads (analytics, blockchain, web, mobile) on the...
It was Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who made the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” popular by publicly urging the US government in mid-1977 to adopt it as a motto in order to save billions of dollars annually. He...
Everyone is familiar with the promise of AI and machine learning. Like a human, these intelligent systems are supposed to be trainable through formal means, and also able to learn by deriving meaning from data that is presented to them. Of course, that’s the theory....
Everyone is under pressure to modernize their mainframe environment—keeping all the mission-critical benefits without being tied to a crushing cost structure and a style of computing that often discourages the agility and creativity enterprises badly need. Several...
AI for the Mainframe: Turning System Data Into Answers For the past year, nearly every conversation about artificial intelligence and the mainframe has centered on one question: What will AI do to COBOL? Will it modernize legacy applications? Generate new programs?...
Part 1 of 4: The Basics At the end of 2016 and lasting a few months into 2017, I completed a proof of concept port of a large Enterprise Application that had been running on the Amazon Web Service Cloud to Linux for System z. This was a Docker based application...
Part 2 of 4: The Good I provided a simplistic overview of what I intended to port to Linux for System z in Part 1. The original application was built for x86 systems. As such, all binaries are built to run on x86 systems. The Docker containers that these applications...
Part 3 of 4: The Bad As I’ve explained in Part 1 Basics and Part 2 Good, I did a proof of concept port of an Enterprise Application from Amazon Web Services on x86 to Linux on System z in 2017. The good news was I got to the point I needed to, the bad news was it was...
