In today’s digital age, mainframes pose challenges to businesses owing to high licensing costs, limited application experts and archaic user interfaces. The primary business and IT drivers for mainframe transformation are as below:

1. Higher Cost: Mainframe is currently operating at a significantly high cost and there is a defined opportunity to reduce the run-cost, possibly as much as fifty percent, while increasing the agility of the overall application landscape.

2. Agility: A modernized environment offers greater and wider capability to integrate with other distributed and new-gen applications and tools; it also offers better impact analysis and development tools to reduce development time and increase response to the business.

3. Technical Risk offered by existing Mainframe Landscape: Most of the legacy technologies are out of support and people with these skills are very rare. Reengineering components running on this software to a new technology will eliminate this risk to a great extent.

4. Adoption to Next Gen and Business Led Transformation: If the mainframe application portfolio were converged from heterogeneous technologies, databases and platforms to a homogeneous and streamlined IT stack, it would be much easier to adopt next-gen technologies.

As mainframe developers experienced with procedural languages retire at increasing rates, and the cost of maintaining the mainframe rises steadily, organisations are justifiably nervous about the future. These organisations need a strategy that embraces agile development and the cloud yet balances with mainframe environments until a full modernisation of their systems can be completed.

Replacing legacy applications and systems with systems based on new and different technologies is one of the information systems (IS) professional’s most significant challenges. As enterprises upgrade or change their technologies, they must ensure compatibility with old systems and data formats that are still in use.
Every technology company has a viewpoint and many consulting and outsourcing companies have provided their perspective, but their views are often tainted by their future business models and not the business model that really matters – their customers. You cannot separate your mainframe-based systems from your business goals and outcomes, as any decision to modernise this platform is really a business decision.

NWT is here to help by helping to guide the business through a difficult decision process and investment. We will not be influenced in recommending the right path even if that means maintaining a mainframe environment for certain applications because of the risk of migration to the business or the cost effectiveness of the approach. It is important that the business impact of any Migration plan is understood especially around the costs, not just of the migration but the ongoing costs of the environment and the future impact on the business.