What Workloads Run On Your
Mainframes?
Jan van Groningen
Chief Technology Officer, Abn Amro
“Any workflow where transaction integrity is important, including millions of daily transactions, all our payment traffic and the ledger of the bank behind it. The mainframe is the only environment for our size and scale where we can be sure data won’t get confused and processes won’t break or fall out of sync. There’s no other system that can mimic the transactional integrity or pervasive encryption the mainframe offers.”
How Do Mainframes
Fit Into Your
Cloud Strategy?
Jan van Groningen
Chief Technology Officer, Abn Amro
“The mainframe is one of our four strategic platforms. We also use an on-prem platform, software-as-a-service and a secured, controlled version of a public cloud, which can run many kinds of workloads. Given the public cloud's ubiquitous nature and self-service capabilities, it is especially suited for workloads that require short time-to-market and are characterized by high-code velocity and frequent deployments. These benefits naturally fit with workloads supporting marketing, campaigning, data analytics and customer engagement. Here, the public cloud with its unique capabilities—and the mainframe with its strong security, performance and transaction-processing capability—are really reinforcing each other.”
Uday Devalla
Chief Technology Officer,
Sagent
“Sagent’s business model revolves around a mainframe-cloud fusion that runs the mortgage servicing solution we provide to financial institutions. We call our mainframe ‘the Mothership,’ and it has been our core servicing system for at least 20 years. Our consumer front end sits on a public cloud that is integrated into the mainframe. So our customers connect directly to our mainframe, but their consumers connect to the cloud.”
Hendrik Devos
Head of IT Infrastructure and Cloud, Belfius Bank
“From an operations perspective, the mainframe is still a superior platform. If we see a benefit from hosting a new workload in the cloud, we will do so, and we have many outgoing and incoming interfaces with external clouds. We have a long tradition on the mainframe. When extending our core banking or investment management, we add functionality to the mainframe, and we add to the mainframe as transaction volumes grow.”
What Are The Advantages Of A Hybrid
Cloud Environment?
Uday Devalla
Chief Technology Officer, Sagent
“We are obligated to provide our clients with a highly stable and scalable platform. We want to make sure that our core infrastructure is rock solid and pair that with mainframe modernization. Kyndryl provides dedicated, fully managed services to Sagent that are helping with our move to zCloud and allowing our platform to connect to more third-party APIs. That will help us provide more modern consumer experiences.”
Hendrik Devos
Head of IT Infrastructure and Cloud, Belfius Bank
“Belfius created a joint venture with Kyndryl to ensure continuity of service after a corporate restructuring. All of our custom application development is still executed by our people, but Kyndryl manages the mainframe platform for us. It gives us operational stability on a superior platform that we cannot beat with on-premises servers or the cloud.”
What Is The Value Of
Outsourcing Mainframe Management?
What Can A
Modernized
Mainframe Do?
All of the executives we interviewed use a combination of cloud-based and on-premises tech along with mainframes. None have seriously considered moving their mission-critical workloads off the mainframe.
That isn’t just a matter of loyalty or inertia. Modern mainframe architectures expose more data and capabilities at the mainframe’s edge, making it easier to build digital customer experiences on a stable base.
Support for modern programming languages and operating system environments means that app development on the mainframe isn’t limited to those who speak COBOL. Support for DevOps and DevSecOps workflows accommodates developers who prefer agile methods.
On the balance sheet, the heavy capital requirements of old are being supplanted by OpEx-friendly, on-demand models that are offered by mainframe managed services providers like Kyndryl. Working with mainframe specialists also makes the technology more accessible to organizations seeking top performance without taking on the responsibility of end-to-end maintenance.
“Customers get the advantages of the mainframe with a consumption-based model that historically has only been available from cloud providers,” says James Rutledge, Kyndryl’s group practice leader of core enterprise and zCloud. “At Kyndryl we offer options—from managed modernization and application services to cloud-connectivity services—based on our customers’ needs.”
With these modern capabilities and financial flexibility, IT leadership has greater freedom to select the ideal tech stack for every project, large and small. Francis DeMarco, core enterprise and zCloud delivery leader at Kyndryl, says there’s value in selecting the right tool for the job. Pairing each enterprise workload with the platform that is best suited for it based on price, performance and stability is a crucial IT leadership responsibility.
“You shouldn’t hire 100 cars to move your house. You could do it, but you should hire a moving truck,” he says. “And you shouldn’t take that moving truck just to go to church.”
The Kyndryl Perspective
LEARN MORE About Why The Mainframe Still Matters