티맥스소프트

 by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

If there’s one thing that the COVID-19 crisis has taught businesses, it’s that digital transformation is no longer something that companies can take their time implementing. You have to be able to support an increased number of remote workers, deliver digital solutions that replace manual and face-to-face processes and interactions, and consider the possibilities of countrywide lock downs and on-premises system outages.

Modernizing systems and moving workloads to the cloud is the best and fastest way to deliver on digital initiatives and address disruption in your market and even the world. To reap the greatest benefits, companies should be planning to move 100 percent to the cloud. But doing that is not easy. Established systems and mainframes run large, highly integrated applications, and changing specific components in these apps can be complex and costly. Let’s explore why and what you can do about it.

Read our whitepaper to learn why moving to the cloud could free you from changing IBM mainframe dynamics.

One out of three IT executives agree: IT modernization is not going as planned

Although 67 percent of technology experts told IDG that they believe their business efforts can’t go forward if they don’t modernize and that delaying modernization is risky, 41 percent of organizations abandoned or delayed modernization on the cloud this year.

Most of the troubles with legacy application modernization are related to the fact that they were written for mainframes, which are still powering the businesses of more than 60% of the world’s leading enterprises. Rewriting these applications is costly and risky. Trying to recreate code that has been written and updated for older hardware can introduce bugs and inconsistencies. New applications may demand steep learning curves that can be time-consuming to master.

In addition, the data needed for these applications is most likely in old formats and siloed in on-premises data centers accessible only by mainframe and legacy databases. Organizations see their options as limited.

The best option for moving to the cloud isn’t obvious

For many companies, the most obvious options for modernizing mainframe applications and databases on the cloud are comprised of the things that nightmares are made out of. Replacing an aging mainframe with the IBM z15 mainframe, for example, could do great harm to your business if IBM completely discards z/OS in favor of Linux. You could lose the intellectual property and the ability to power your enterprise.

Legacy app rewriting requires a massive uptick in IT spend. You will need resources with skills in the modern languages, technology, and coding are required to meet the demands of modern business, and whether you outsource or hire, they don’t come cheap. Also, that talent pool is shrinking each year.

Code conversion might seem like a viable option, but those projects are fraught with problems. They start with millions of lines of COBOL that encapsulate decades of business processes, protocols, and lessons learned and try to force fit them into modern languages, IDEs, components, and platforms. The result is a slew of significant problems and the ordeal ends up costing way more than estimated. Some even fail.

If you believe these are the only options for modernization and moving to the cloud, we have good news. There is a better and faster approach.

A legacy modernization platform and modern RDBMS: The key to accelerating your move

A legacy modernization platform and a modern relational database management system (RDBMS) are your fast path to the cloud, leaving the other options in the dust.

A legacy modernization platform is specially designed software that moves legacy mainframe applications from an IBM z/OS environment to the cloud quickly and cost-effectively. To deliver extremely high performance, it enables horizontal and vertical scalability and allows for significant reduction in annual run costs for an increased investment in innovation. There is no change to the end-user experience or application business logic. Organizations can use their existing workforce and skillsets. It supports both containers and virtualized environments.

The migration is easy and takes about 6 to 12 months, ensuring a rapid ROI. Supporting COBOL, Assembler, PL/I, Easytrieve, and more legacy technologies, it deploys on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments.

Transitions to 100 percent cloud should include database management. But on-premises, legacy databases often lock you in to usage or licensing restrictions. A modern RDBMS can help by reducing CapEx and OpEX and operating expenses with simplified licensing. Organizations only license the compute power associated to a given VM regardless of the amount of resources the database consumes.

Providing an enhanced view of processing, managing and securing large-scale databases, a modern RDBMS has the hyper-thread architecture, high-security database encryption, and multi-node parallel recovery required for a reliable, high-performance database. It scales with the cloud rather than proprietary database servers. It offers high availability with active-active clustering, high-performance transaction processing, and active or passive standby database capability.

Ready to leave on-premises behind for good?

It’s time to get serious about getting out of the data center and off the mainframe through a successful migration to the cloud. TmaxSoft has developed its flagship solutions, OpenFrame and Tibero, to work in tandem so that moving off your mainframe and legacy database is painless and enables you to reap the benefits of greater flexibility and agility and lower costs. Best of all, you can run key mission-critical business applications in the cloud secure in the knowledge that they will deliver the performance you need to meet any business challenge that comes your way.

To learn more about how OpenFrame can help organizations with legacy z/OS apps, read our whitepaper, Mainframe at a Crossroads. For details about how you can regain control of your database, check out our eBook, Time for lower costs, greater flexibility, and more security.

About Kelly McClure

Kelly McClure is the Vice President of Global Marketing for TmaxSoft. Her 20-year marketing career spans both Fortune 1000 companies and fast growth technology startups. Kelly is responsible for leading TmaxSoft’s marketing strategy. She is experienced in aligning marketing and sales, building relevant content and messaging and developing integrated lead generation campaigns. Before joining TmaxSoft, Kelly served as the Vice President of Marketing for 10th Magnitude and held senior marketing roles with DataStax, BMC Software and Micro Focus. Kelly has a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and an MBA from Loyola University Chicago.