What are modern applications and what do they mean for you?

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

Modern applications scale quickly to potentially millions of users, are highly available globally, manage petabytes of data or more, and respond in milliseconds. We owe their beginnings to the ubiquitous rally cry to “innovate and respond to change faster!” Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, this cry is now more insistent than ever. To create a workforce from home, organizations stepped up their digital transformation in the form of cloud migration and modernization. As a result, modern applications have come into their own.

Now that some of the biggest names in business have released applications that do cool things from the cloud and excite consumers, the race is on to build more of them. In this article, we break down modern applications for you and explain how they relate to mainframe modernization.

What is a modern application?

A modern application covers use cases that include web and mobile backends, IoT applications, AI/ML workloads, batch processing, shared services platforms, microservice backends, and more. Developers and IT organizations build them with a combination of modular architecture patterns, serverless operational models, DevOps, DevSecOps, low-code, and agile development processes. A modern application is an answer to the slow, ponderous, and long release times of monolithic software because it offers greater scalability, portability, resiliency, and agility.

Scalability is important because millions of users around the world want to use applications on demand (think Uber or Amazon). Usually, a modern application runs on multiple and hybrid clouds, which delivers the portability to meet the needs of enterprises with different cloud providers and a mix of environments. It is built to stay up in a disaster, during network unavailability, and through other causes of downtime, which makes it resilient. It is easy to change or update rapidly, providing the agility to address almost any new technological or consumer development.

What are modern applications made of?

Modern applications vary widely in form and function, but they share these common practices and components.

Microservices and APIs

Microservices and APIs are instrumental in reusing existing code, which reduce work and increase application throughput. Developers build modern applications in small chunks called microservices that can be incrementally pushed to testing and deployment. This promotes reusability, which is the process of developing each chunk for deployment to multiple applications. Modern applications also use standards based application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect microservices, offer access to legacy data, and reduce the need to write complex integration code.

Containers

Containers drive modern application portability and efficiency. A container is a standard unit of a modern application. It packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. Containers isolate a modern application from its environment and ensures that it works uniformly despite differences between development and staging. They differ from virtual machines because they virtualize operating systems instead of hardware.

DevSecOps

DevSecOps, often referred to as “shift-left security” is the process of making security part of the modern application’s design rather than adding it as an afterthought. DevSecOps says goodbye to the endless testing and defect resolution that holds up the release of traditional application into production and to the market. Developers check code into a repository and during that process, the code is scanned for vulnerabilities.

CI/CD

Modern applications and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) go hand in hand. CI/CD creates pipelines for rapidly testing and release smaller code increments. As a result, IT organizations can launch a large number of small code releases with fewer defects rather than one huge code release a year.

Automation

Automation technology underpins modern applications. Using the power of cloud and AI, modern software applications can scale on demand and be provisioned and de-provisioned automatically. They rely on orchestration tools like Kubernetes to manage container deployment and infrastructure as code to provision the entire technology stack for an application. Infrastructure-as-code technology enables anything to be source code — servers, firewalls, routers, load balancers, identity permissions or all of it.

Modern applications: What’s mainframe modernization got to do with them?

Modern applications are cloud native. They will not run on aging mainframe hardware infrastructure in an on-premises data center, nor can you build them on that kind of technology stack. They need the cloud for development and to run. If you’re thinking that you will just stick with the applications and mainframe you have now and try to rearchitect them to be more flexible, portable, available, resilient, and agile, the likelihood of success is slim.

For example, banks and healthcare organizations have had difficulty delivering the kinds of mobile applications their customers and patients expect from on-premises data centers and infrastructure because of their underlying legacy source code.

The good news is that it is possible to migrate your legacy applications to the cloud and, once there, you can rearchitect them as modern applications. All you need is a mainframe and legacy modernization platform. This platform takes your existing mainframe applications and transforms them into a Java microservices architecture in the cloud. It automatically converts source code, data, security, online/batch processing, and your data tier.

The result is a cloud-native technology that can form the foundation for modern application development. Other benefits are access to widely supported technology, lower TCO, and rapid deployment of new features and applications.

Thinking of all the modern app innovating you can do with a more flexible and scalable cloud environment?

TmaxSoft OpenFrame is a mainframe and legacy modernization platform that can easily tackle your IT modernization projects. It moves you through the rearchitecting steps at your pace, automating many of processes until you’re completely free of your legacy. To learn more about how OpenFrame can get you on the fast-track to IT modernization, view this “Powerful IT Modernization Strategies” webinar.

What is technical debt and what can you do about it?

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

Technical debt in software development terms is the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code. Development teams accelerate the deployment of software functionality or the release of an entire application that later needs to be refactored. Think of these measures to speed up delivery as like taking out variable mortgage to get yourself in a house faster and then discovering your payments balloon as the interest rate increases.

Technical debt is not limited to software development, however. It can also apply to deciding to do nothing but patch and maintain your legacy mainframe applications—at the cost of 80% of your IT budget. With this technical debt, you’re paying for your inaction with what is often more time, money, and resources than it would have taken you invest in modernizing your applications. And you’re paying a high price; in 2018, it is estimated that fixing software issues cost U.S. enterprises $2.84 trillion. In this blog, we explain the technical debt your legacy applications are racking up and what you can do about it.

Technical debt and legacy applications: What your mainframe is costing you

Although the pandemic created a demand for modern applications that run in the cloud, most mission-critical applications and systems still reside in mainframes today. For example, in financial services, insurance, and banking, as many as 60% of all core processes are running on mainframes. Also, COBOL applications are still handling the vast majority of computer transactions. COBOL is the primary language of mainframes.

Many organizations see no reason for upsetting this apple cart. Their businesses are humming along nicely, and nothing has crashed. They are oblivious to the fact that COBOL programmers are decreasing as they retire or change careers. Replacing them is difficult because younger developers are all about Rust, Python, and Go. In addition, a fear of investing in what is seen as expensive alternatives in a world where cost reductions are revered has created blinders to all kinds of technical debt. Running aging applications does not come cheap, and the bills mount up until they threaten swallow a good portion of your revenue. Let’s look at some examples.

The high cost of the endless patch-and-fix process

Updating decades-old legacy applications is just one big money pit that you can’t dig out of easily. When new functionality or a workaround is needed to address their limitations or something that has broken, the race is on to bolt something as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, your fix is likely to break something else. Then you have to rev up another project to address this new issue. You never stop paying this technical debt.

The infrastructure and licensing price hike cycle

Infrastructure and licensing for a mainframe come at a high price, and expenses rise each year as technology changes and systems get older. Compatible hardware becomes hard to find, support contracts lapse or raise rates, and organizations pay for server space that is only used when there is a need to scale, which is usually just a few times a year. Some businesses freeze their software support levels to the point of expiration out of compliance – another cost to the business.

The ride into the sunset that leaves hidden expenses behind

When a vendor sunsets software, frameworks, and applications that the mainframe and company rely on, it creates a dark cloud of costs that blanket IT. Do you risk using a tool that is not supported or try to find a replacement with little planning? This is technical debt in a nutshell, plus if you select the replacement, you are at the mercy of third parties who sense your desperation and raise their fees.

The developer and the damage done

Mainframes applications are complex with a confusing code base. When it is time to change or upgrade, high-priced, on-demand developers often make haphazard changes that only leave the system more incomprehensible. The result could be a higher probability of breaches and failures. If something fails and your organization does not have the resources or knowledge to bring it back online quickly, your bottom line will take a significant hit. And if the system stays down for more than a few hours, it is possible that customers will leave and not return.

Getting out of technical debt

Is there an end to this legacy application debt? The answer is yes. You can pay down your technical debut with mainframe migration and legacy modernization, sometimes called “lift-and-shift.” Existing mainframe applications move unchanged to a modern open environment. Once on this modern platform, applications interact with APIs, new user interfaces and other modern technology such as containers. When done properly, mainframe migration and legacy modernization preserve your mainframe investment and help erase the technical debt created by clinging to older legacy applications and your mainframe.

TmaxSoft OpenFrame is a mainframe and legacy modernization platform that can help you pay down your legacy technical debt. It moves you through the rearchitecting steps at your pace, automating many of processes until you’re completely free of your legacy.

To learn more about how OpenFrame can get you on the fast-track to IT modernization and out of technical debt, read our eBook, Proven Mainframe Modernization Strategies,

Into the wide blue yonder: Mainframe modernization on Microsoft Azure

by Karthik Masilamani, Vice President of Global Channels and Partnerships

On March 15, 2021, we proudly announced our partnership with Microsoft Azure to deploy TmaxSoft OpenFrame on its leading cloud platform. OpenFrame enables mainframe applications, resources, and data to be migrated to a high-performance open system, such as the cloud, with no changes to the underlying business logic. Let’s dive a little deeper into the benefits of deploying OpenFrame on Microsoft Azure.

The blue sky’s the limit: What is Microsoft Azure exactly?

Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform that can replace or supplement on-premises servers. Although most commonly referred to in the singular, Azure is actually a combination of solutions that include Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS), all of which can be used for analytics, virtual computing, storage, networking, and much more. Currently, Microsoft says that Azure consists of more than 200 cloud solutions and services.

Azure has many benefits. It offers seemingly limitless computing capability for everything from data storage to running core business systems to creating apps out of microservices. It enables you to scale compute resources up and down as needed. It supports almost all operating systems, languages, tools, and frameworks. Its availability SLA is 99.95% and it offers 24 x 7 technical support. Its data centers are geo-located all over the world. The most attractive benefit to most customers is its pricing model—you pay only for what you use. It’s no wonder that 95% of the world’s largest enterprises are utilizing Azure to run part or all of their business.

On mainframe street: Where OpenFrame and Azure meet

Today, elasticity, reliability, and scalability are needed to address a massive growth in digital business, workplaces, and social and healthcare. Modern applications that can be quickly changed to meet customer demands and expectations are critical for survival, as is the fast access to data for the business, edge computing, and AI. The mainframe is not the platform for these imperatives; the cloud is. By using OpenFrame to your legacy applications and data completely to Microsoft Azure, you can be off and running on the journey to successful digital transformation.

OpenFrame allows you to take your existing mainframe assets and move them to Microsoft Azure. OpenFrame creates an emulation environment on Azure, enabling you to quickly migrate applications without reformatting anything. For example, OpenFrame online services replace mainframe middleware such as IBM CICS and JES. OpenFrame compilers interprets the mainframe’s COBOL, PL/I, and assembler programs. All of this can be done in less than 12 months, and, in some cases, six months. The result is super-charged application and data infrastructure that runs flawlessly on the cloud.

"TmaxSoft OpenFrame is an efficient and reliant way of re-platforming a client's IBM, Fujitsu, or Hitachi mainframe workloads to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. By doing so, enterprises can run mission-critical Assembler, COBOL, and PL/I applications, while benefiting from the reliability and scalability of the cloud," says Bob Ellsworth, WW Director Mainframe Transformation at Microsoft.

Battle of the blues: Benchmarking OpenFrame on Azure against IBM Z

It’s all very well to tout the benefits of Azure, but as the platform grows in popularity, so too do doubts of the veracity of the advantages. Determined to get to the truth, we commissioned a benchmark study to that pit OpenFrame on Azure against IBM System z. We ran zRef, a representation of a z/OS batch and CICS application written in COBOL that used DB2 and simulated a real financial application, on OpenFrame, hosted in Microsoft Azure as a single node architecture.

We tested System z and zRef on OpenFrame on Azure under the same conditions. When the test was complete, we found that OpenFrame on Azure performed and scaled better than the z/OS and System z infrastructure and at a much lower cost. It also delivered the same or better performance and batch/online transaction response time, and service levels. And OpenFrame provided the equivalent of several hundred to many thousands of MIPS capacity when hosted in the Azure infrastructure.

“Deploying OpenFrame on Azure dramatically reduces operating costs while delivering improved agility and flexibility. It enables our customers to more easily modernize their application portfolios to meet their ever-changing business needs," explains Karthik Masilamani, VP of Global Partnerships at TmaxSoft.

Got a cloud imperative? Consider Azure and OpenFrame

To meet the business demands created by the pandemic, most digital transformation initiatives require the cloud. You can jumpstart yours by modernizing your mainframe on Azure with OpenFrame. Check out our new eBook on modernization or read the full OpenFrame on Azure benchmark study.

At your microservices and service mesh: An infrastructure built for a new standard

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

As the one-year anniversary of the pandemic declaration has come and gone, it is getting more difficult to remember what business was like before March 11, 2020. Although we miss the human interaction of office work; some things should be left in the past. Even though vaccinations have created a light at the end of the tunnel, what it illuminates will not be like the past. The top 7 tech trends for 2021 not only reflect the journey to the light but also what lies beyond it.

In short, the 7 tech trends are the way forward for business. In tandem, they are what you can use to thrive in a post-pandemic world. However, you can’t do this with an infrastructure that is decades old. In this series of blogs, we have been showing you how modernization in the cloud is the foundation for adopting the 7 trends. We have already tackled customer experience (CX), data integration, digital culture, digital innovation, the composable enterprise, and automation. This blog looks at the final trend, microservices and service mesh.

Angels in the architecture: Microservices

Microservices have been around since 2009 at least. Recently, as more tech giants have publicized their moves to microservices, they have really taken off. This is because they resolve a lot of the problems of monolithic application architectures, which develop performance issues when they are scaled and are hard to change quickly. So, what are microservices exactly?

Microservices.io has this definition: “an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services.” Software functionality is isolated into multiple independent modules that are individually responsible for specific standalone tasks. The modules communicate with one another via simple, universally accessible application programming interfaces (APIs). As a result, one team’s changes won’t break an entire app, unlike in monolithic application architectures. Microservices can be deployed in virtual machines or containers; however, containers are becoming the microservices deployment method of choice.

Amazon is a microservices pioneer. It wanted a more robust application that could handle new features and functions quickly. So, it moved from a monolith to a fully distributed, decentralized services architecture. Another pioneer is Netflix, who has built one of the most well-known examples of a modern microservices architecture – one that features an API gateway that handles about two billion API edge requests a day, all supported by over 500 microservices.

Communication breakdown: Service mesh

As the Netflix example shows, in the microservices world, an application can consist of hundreds of services. Each service could have thousands of instances. If the container deployment method is being used, a container orchestrator like Kubernetes is constantly changing the instances. This creates incredibly complex service-to-service communication, which is essential to microservices during runtime.

To ensure end-to-end performance, reliability, and security, organizations are increasingly turning to a service mesh, which adds observability, security, and reliability features to applications by inserting them at the platform layer rather than the application layer. As a result, the application doesn’t need to implement these features, or even be aware of the service mesh.

Lyft is an example of company that uses a service mesh it developed itself. Lyft’s Envoy, one of the earliest service meshes, enables services to communicate with one another through a proxy that is outside the application. It supports L3/L4 filter architecture like a TCP/IP proxy, HTTP/2 based L7 filter architecture, service discovery and active/passive health checking, load balancing, authentication and authorization, and observability. Microsoft, HP, Walmart, and Nordstrom use another service mesh called Linkerd. Cash App, eBay, Giphy, and Intuit use Istio, Google’s and IBM’s joint mesh service.

Microservices, service mesh, and modern cloud infrastructures

Microservices, service mesh, containers, and Kubernetes all enable you to offer differentiated digital services to your customers or consumers. Gartner predicts that these technical advancements will be in place in 70% of organizations by 2022. They are a key aspect of digital transformation, and they can also help you make other tech trends, such as customer experience and automation, a reality.

What should not go unnoticed is these modern application structures were not built for the infrastructures of yesteryear. Although microservices and containers can run on virtual machines, they are more efficient, scalable, and powerful in the cloud. Plus, Kubernetes and service meshes need the cloud. Therefore, an on-premises data center that houses an aging mainframe, legacy applications, and a rigid database with high licensing costs is going to severely inhibit their use.

Instead, you should migrate your mainframe and legacy applications to a cloud infrastructure designed for microservices, service mesh, and more. To do this, you need a legacy modernization platform. With a legacy modernization platform, you move your applications to a cloud-based environment with no reformatting, code changes or user impact. Once in this environment, you can modernize your apps and by breaking them into faster, responsive, agile microservices, and set up your service mesh. To enable your service mesh to help your microservice applications share data with one another, you should also consider a modern RDBMS that runs in the cloud.

Ready to break free from monoliths?

Two TmaxSoft products, OpenFrame and Tibero, can provide the legacy modernization platform and RDBMS you need to make microservices and service mesh part of your digital transformation strategy. Both solutions make it easy to transition your application architectures to the cloud. Learn more about modernizing your legacy applications and moving away from on-premises architectures by reading our eBook on proven modernization strategies.

Necessity is the mother of automation, but modernization gets it done

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

The events of 2020 produced the top 7 tech trends for 2021. Companies that had barely given a nod to digital transformation in the years prior were suddenly consumed by it. Lockdowns, work from home, offsite access to onsite processes, digitalizing everything from equipment to loan applications resulted in a mad scramble for business continuity. Most of these digital initiatives brought much-needed relief, but there’s still work to be done. The return to normal is slow and not even assured.

To thrive as the aftermath of 2020 plays out in 2021, your best bet is to embrace the 7 tech trends. However, you also need to take stock of your on-premises and legacy situations. They will have difficulty bearing the load needed to support the trends. That’s where modernization of your IT on a cloud infrastructure comes in. Our series of articles shows you how modernization is the bedrock of each trend. We have already tackled customer experience (CX), data integration, digital culture, digital innovation, and the composable enterprise. This article looks at the sixth topic, automation.

Total automation in perpetual motion

Technology has always had its roots in automation. Telephones, cars, personal computers, barcodes, and digital photography are all examples of how machines have removed manual processes to make our lives easier. So have programs, software, and applications for business process modeling, workflow, case management, and productivity.

And now, the cloud is opening a brave new automation frontier. Think Zoom, digital twinning, virtual healthcare, and no-code and low-code platforms that automate software development. It is also revolutionizing robotic process automation by transforming it into self-service technology accessed via a web-based graphical interface from anywhere. With a single click or drag-and-drop motion, the mindless tasks of a job are automated.

In addition, Gartner predicts that we will see a dramatic increase in the use of emerging automation technology, such as.

• IoB (Internet of Behavior): Using sensors to track behavior, such as an auto insurance company determining rates according to how a customer drives
• Paid virtual experiences: Replacing physical visits to amusement parks, sports venues, and museums
• Automatic remediation: Focusing operations more on continuous engineering and less on support
• AIOps: Reducing unplanned downtime with automated change risk analysis in DevOps pipelines
• Devised artificial intelligence (AI) orchestration platforms: Operationalizing AI and deploying it similarly to container orchestration
• Hyperautomation: Extending legacy business process automation beyond individual processes by marrying AI tools with RPA to deliver automation for virtually any repetitive task executed by business users

In short, automation is coming into its own, and 2021 is its time. This is the year that it will be indispensable, and, therefore, you need to be sure you can adopt it wherever it makes sense in your organization.

Modernization: How you get the maximum use from automation

The promise of automation cannot be realized in an on-premises data center that is housing an aging mainframe, legacy applications, and a rigid database with high licensing costs. In Gartner’s predictions about automation, the cloud is ever present. The fastest and most effective automation technology is deployed in the cloud. The reason why is a no-brainer. Automation calls for a flexible, scalable, and high-performing cloud infrastructure—and modern, more agile applications and database management.

If you’re now worrying about having to rewrite your legacy applications to enable automation, you can stop. You can get them into the cloud and benefit from automation without rewriting. And, no, you will not be developing APIs that connect to them from the cloud, either. Instead, you move your applications to a cloud-based environment with no reformatting, code changes or user impact. Once in this environment, they run as-is, but you also have the option of rearchitecting them to fit your automation plans.

As part of that migration or even after it is complete, you can also move mainframe data to the cloud and implement an RDBMS with the architecture for a reliable, high-performance database. In this scenario, after it is migrated, your data is stored in an isolated database tier that supports industry-standard SQL databases. A modern database management system then delivers the data you need for your automation initiatives while enabling agility, flexibility, and availability. APIs available from different sources inside or outside IT can easily access that data and connect it to new automation applications.

Are you ready for maximum automation?

Two TmaxSoft products, OpenFrame and Tibero, can provide the legacy modernization platform and RDBMS that enable you take advantage of the efficiency, innovation, and speed of automation. Learn how to become the agile, flexible, and automated enterprise needed to thrive in a brave new technology world. Learn more about how you can be much cooler online by reading our eBook on proven modernization strategies.

Breaking up isn’t hard to do: The composable enterprise

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

The TmaxSoft top 7 tech trends for 2021 makes it clear: 2020 turbocharged digital transformation in every industry. So many things had to go online at once. Companies were suddenly having to figure out how to digitalize in weeks or months. Some businesses jumped right in because they were already headed that way. Others found themselves coming up with solutions on the fly and faster than they thought. So, what’s the way forward now?

The answer is to embrace the 7 tech trends. Embedding them in your company’s digital DNA will deliver positive, long-lasting business outcomes and advantages. The process requires a firm foundation—which is the modernization of your IT on a modern cloud infrastructure that supports business agility and innovation. Our series of blogs based on the top 7 trends shows you how modernization goes hand-in-hand with each. We have already tackled customer experience (CX), data integration, digital culture, and digital innovation. This article is about the fifth trend—the composable enterprise.

Mission not impossible: What is the composable enterprise?

Last year, we had to deliver personalization, connected digital experiences, on-demand everything, voice technology, artificial intelligence, and new business models at a pace once unthinkable. If your organization found it difficult to keep up, you are not alone. IDG reports that just 7% of organizations have fully implemented a digital-first approach to business. In addition, just 37% of organizations say they are fully capable of supporting a digital business strategy long-term.

So, is all the talk of rapid digital transformation crazy? Are we all dreaming the impossible dream? No, says Gartner. In fact, the time has never been more right for it. The secret is to transform into a composable enterprise, which Gartner describes “as an organization that can innovate and adapt to changing business needs through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities.”[1]

The composable enterprise is a 180-degree turn from the traditional method of choosing technology to increase efficiency and adding to it as new solutions are released from a few chosen vendors. The composable enterprise relies on a hyper selective technology acquisition approach. You pick and choose between a wide range of tools to stay ahead of competitors and satisfy clients. The business gets to compose architecture with IT through “as-a-service” subscriptions and cloud solutions.

Becoming a composable enterprise offers many benefits. It delivers a reliable IT infrastructure. You have flexible access to data and applications. Mindless, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks are eliminated by automation. Your DevOps and capex costs are lower. Best of all, digital transformation is faster and less complex.

Compose yourself: Modernization is key

Composable enterprises require a flexible, scalable, and agile cloud infrastructure. And because important data and transactions reside in legacy applications, it means finding a way to get them on that infrastructure. The last thing you need is to try to rewrite them in more modern languages or go through the complex task of developing APIs that connect to them.

The cloud is where composable enterprises live. Therefore, to become a composable enterprise, you start by moving existing applications to a cloud-based environment with no reformatting, code changes or user impact. Once in this environment, they run as-is, but you also have the option of rearchitecting them to fit your new needs.

While that migration is occurring, or afterwards, you can move mainframe data to the cloud and implement an RDBMS with the architecture for a reliable, high-performance database. Your data resides in an isolated database tier that supports industry-standard SQL databases and a database management system that delivers data that digital innovation projects need while enabling agility and flexibility. APIs available from different sources inside or outside IT can easily access that data and connect it to new applications.

Ready to become the enterprise of the future?

Two TmaxSoft products, OpenFrame and Tibero, can provide the legacy modernization platform and RDBMS that enable you to cast off the technology strategies of yesterday. Learn how to become the agile, flexible, innovative, and digital-first enterprise needed to thrive in the new business world. Learn more about how you can become the enterprise of the future by reading our eBook on proven modernization strategies.

 

 

[1] Gartner, Inc. “Future of Applications: Delivering the Composable Enterprise.” February 11, 2020. Dennis Gaughan, Yefim Natis, Gene Alvarez, Mark O'Neill

Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

So much cooler online: How modernization delivers digital innovation

Digital innovation, customer experience, data integration, digital cultures, digital innovation, composable enterprises, automation, and microservices and service mesh are all in our top 7 tech trends for 2021. The acceleration of digital transformation during 2020 to address situations caused by the pandemic is directly responsible for these trends. Some businesses were able to adjust quickly because they were already firmly on the path of becoming digital and ready to add more online capabilities, others not so much.  Of the latter, some still pivoted rapidly by jumpstarting digitalization.

For those still trying to find their way, it’s not too late. Embracing the 7 tech trends yields positive business outcomes for those not yet on the path, as well as those who are already humming along. And there is one simple rule that can make all your digitalization dreams come true: modernize your IT on a modern cloud infrastructure that supports business agility and innovation. In our series of blogs on how modernization addresses the seven trends, we have covered customer experience (CX), data integration, and digital culture. This article is about the fourth trend—digital innovation.

A whole ‘nother you: What is digital innovation?

Digital innovation refers to the application of digital technology to existing and often analog business problems that changes the trajectory of a company in some way. In Brad Paisley’s number one hit called “Online,” he describes how a young man who has a sad life becomes a totally new person—"a whole ‘nother me”—by going online. Digital innovation offers that opportunity, only it’s real instead of being in someone’s imagination. In fact, digital innovation takes what’s in your imagination, gives it shape and form, and then puts it out there for your customers, employees, and others.

Digital innovation rewrites the rulebook for business and delivers competitive advantage. There are poster children for digital innovation like Uber, Airbnb, Carvana, Doordash, and Instacart. But traditional companies are often just as successful at it, if not more so. Consider Domino’s, for example. It launched its first website in 1996 and made it part of its company culture. 11 years later, it offered web and mobile online ordering, and introduced its revolutionary Domino’s tracker in 2008. This was a full year before digital innovator Uber was founded and two years before Uber launched its app. Since 2008, Domino’s revenue has increased $5.6 billion to $9.6 billion in 2019.

Digital innovation is the way for your company to go from 5’3” to 6’5” as described in Paisley’s song. It is an inside-to-outside process. It involves automating internal operations, finding new ways to engage users, and offering new products and services to customers or users. At the heart of it all is the delivery of modern applications that make it easier for customers to interact with your business and purchase your products and services.

Fire up your legacy applications and data with modernization

Digital innovation is best delivered with a platform and infrastructure that enables your business units and IT to brainstorm and be creative. The last thing you need is for your IT resources to be bogged down by maintaining legacy apps or going around Robinhood’s barn to access data. Those are the kind of tasks where digitally innovative dreams go to die. So, if you’re serious about remaking, reimagining, or even starting a new digitally innovative business, your first step is shedding what is likely holding you back.

The cloud is where digital innovation happens. Therefore, you need a modern cloud infrastructure to create the strong foundation you need to deliver on your innovation ideas. Creating this modern infrastructure starts with moving existing applications to a cloud-based environment with no reformatting, code changes or user impact. You gain the agility, reliability and scalability of an open, modern system on the cloud and the cost savings are substantial. This leaves more resources for building innovative digital solutions.

After your migration is complete or even simultaneously, you can take the next big step—moving mainframe data to the cloud and implementing an RDBMS with the architecture for a reliable, high-performance database. Your data resides in an isolated database tier that supports industry-standard SQL databases and a database management system that delivers data that digital innovation projects need while enabling agility and flexibility.

Innovate in technicolor

Two TmaxSoft products, OpenFrame and Tibero, can provide the legacy modernization platform and RDBMS that enable your innovation to go from a black-and-white dream to a technicolor reality. Learn more about how you can be much cooler online by reading our eBook on modernizing your infrastructure.

Don’t string your digital culture plans along—go all in with modernization

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

The top 7 tech trends we have identified for 2021 are customer experience, data integration, digital cultures, digital innovation, composable enterprises, automation, and microservices and service mesh. These trends are all part of the transitioning of digital transformation from “on the horizon” to “implement it as soon as possible—or even sooner.” Moving business, eCommerce, meetings, conferences, and operations online became critical survival in 2020, and even now, in 2021, digital transformation is top of mind for everyone.

Companies that want to thrive and outpace the competition need to adopt all seven of these trends. If that seems like a Herculean effort, we have good news. There is a step you can take that will put all these trends within reach: modernizing and migrating legacy apps and databases to a modern cloud infrastructure. So, we’re compiling a series of blogs that tackles each of the seven trends and explains how modernization and migration can make them happen. We started with customer experience (CX), followed by data integration. This blog is about the third trend—digital culture.

Digital culture club

This year, much of the business workforce is still remote, and enterprises have reevaluated and changed processes to ensure that productivity levels don’t falter, and employees remain safe. This may not be temporary. It appears that some employees who are working from home may choose not to return to the office in the long term. Onsite client visits, trade shows, and big tech events remain virtual. Companies are in new territory, trying to build and nurture digital cultures that rely on technology to meet customer demands and get work done.

A strong digital culture supports an always-on workforce and facilitates employee engagement with intuitive consumer-grade apps that connect to data from multiple tools and systems, delivering critical customer information or operations insights seamlessly. It is fueled by employee self-service portals and mobile apps that enable high productivity safely even when working conditions or workplace rules change unexpectedly. It offers automation that handles help questions or simple customer service interactions so employees can focus on urgent customer issues. And, it has completely mastered the delivery of virtual events for customers and prospects.

There’s a line in the Culture Club song, “Karma Chameleon,” that applies to building and growing a healthy digital culture. That line is “Don’t string me along.” The process can’t be piecemeal, with single apps that only accomplish one task or that only work on certain devices. You need to deliver interconnected, high-performing applications that support innovation and execution in a digitally enabled business environment.

Modernization could be so easy

Providing employees with modern, easy-to-use, and high-performing apps does not have to be a complex, seemingly endless endeavor with lengthy downtime and lots of new app development.  Sensible options are available, such as mainframe migration, legacy app modernization, and cloud database management. All offer what you need to move to the cloud while keeping confidential applications and data safe and secure.

Mainframe migration and legacy app modernization move applications to a cloud-based environment with no reformatting, code changes or user impact. This new environment runs a special legacy modernization platform that provides the development and execution environment required by traditional mainframe programming technology. You gain the agility, reliability and scalability of an open, modern system on the cloud and the cost savings are substantial. This leaves more resources for building the innovative digital solutions that support a digital culture because legacy maintenance is significantly reduced.

After migrating mainframe apps to a cloud environment that supports modern business-to-employee app development, you can take the second big step needed for holistic modernization—moving mainframe data to the cloud and implementing an RDBMS with the architecture for a reliable, high-performance database. Your data resides in an isolated database tier that supports industry-standard SQL databases and a database management system that delivers data your employees need and enables agility and flexibility.

Nurture your digital culture with TmaxSoft

Two TmaxSoft products, OpenFrame and Tibero, can provide the legacy modernization platform and RDBMS that can serve as foundation for developing and delivering the unified, employee-centric that are at the core of digital culture. Learn more about the benefits of modernizing your infrastructure in this eBook.

Revving up data integration: Why a modern infrastructure is the accelerator

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

Recently, we identified the top 7 tech trends for 2021—customer experience, data integration, digital cultures, digital innovation, composable enterprises, automation, and microservices and service mesh. These trends are all digital in one way or another, a reflection of how digital transformation transitioned from “someday soon” to “do it now.” The digitization of processes, such as online ordering and delivery or health and safety reporting, became critical to survival in 2020, and even now, in 2021, it still is.

Disruptive and innovative digital transformation is here to stay. Outpacing the competition requires companies to get up to speed on these tech trends. To us, the common thread running through the trends was obvious—modernization. Being on-trend means modernizing and migrating legacy apps and databases to a modern, cloud infrastructure. So, we’re writing a series of blogs that tackles each of the seven trends and explains how modernization and migration can make them happen. We started with customer experience (CX), and now we’re tackling data integration.

Data, data everywhere—but is it enough just have it?

To keep pace with the explosion of digital solutions to analog problems, faster ways to unlock data and gain insights are critical. In 2021, it will be data that separates you from your competitors and delights customers. When a patient opens up an application to schedule a doctor’s visit and sign up for a virtual waiting room, that app has to integrate with not just the patient’s data, but also the clinic’s scheduling data.

When someone is ordering a gift basket for a friend, data integration is how the order and payment get where they need to be and a delivery is scheduled. That’s why pulling data out of silos, and aggregating, analyzing, and acting on it must be your company’s lifeline in these uncertain times. Unfortunately, unless your company was born in the cloud and runs on the latest cloud databases, database vendor lock-in makes the new breed of data integration and storage—such as data lakes and cloud data warehouses—difficult, if not impossible.

It can be an ordeal to unlock critical insights from monolithic databases, and their management systems struggle keep up with big data and analytics workloads. The result is an adverse effect on performance, stability, and reliability—the three key cornerstones to a successful digital business or transformation strategy. For example, imagine that your company has decided to implement a modern, cloud customer relationship system (CRM) that can be accessed from different devices and platforms. If your database is slow to update and hard to reach, you won’t get the benefits of that CRM.

Manage your data wisely from the cloud

Wringing every drop of value from your data while making sure it’s delivered wherever it’s needed to meet business needs and satisfy customers requires a change in mindset. You need to get your head into the cloud (and not out of it). The cloud offers the elasticity, reliability, and scalability needed for the data integration and analytics that drives digital business, workplaces, social interactions, and healthcare. Only the cloud can deliver the fast access to data for the business, edge computing, and AI.

To get set up on the cloud to make the most of your data, modernization is the name of the game. It starts with a legacy modernization platform. This platform uses specially designed software to move legacy mainframe applications from a legacy environment to the cloud of your choice quickly and cost-effectively. In 12 months or less, you have a multi-tiered cloud-ready architecture with a rapid ROI.

Then, it’s time for a modern relational database management system (RDBMS) that provides an enhanced view of processing, managing and securing large-scale databases. This 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.

The combination of a legacy modernization platform and a modern RDBMS makes it easy to integrate data with all your applications—without starting from scratch. It is a sensible option for managing and accessing data. No workload or application is left behind, and your organization can build modern applications in the new infrastructure that take advantage of easy access and integration.

Access, integrate, analyze and act on your data with TmaxSoft

Two TmaxSoft products, OpenFrame and Tibero, can provide the legacy modernization platform and RDBMS to help you access, integrate, analyze, and act on your data. Learn more about the benefits of modernizing your infrastructure in this eBook.

Customer experience: Why a modern infrastructure is the RX for CX

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

Recently, we identified the top 7 tech trends for 2021 based on research from Mulesoft, ZDNet, and others—customer experience, data integration, digital cultures, digital innovation, composable enterprises, automation, and microservices and service mesh. Every one of these trends has a digital component, a reflection of how the view of digital transformation transitioned from “it’s in the works” to “we have to do this now.” Putting off the digitization of processes, such as checking equipment out of a lab or a loan application, could have meant the end of a business, and even now, in 2021, it still could.

The need for disruptive innovative digital transformation isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Businesses who want to stay ahead in an uncertain climate will need to be on-trend. The good news is that we have the prescription for success—the migration of legacy apps and databases to a modern, cloud infrastructure. This has inspired us to write a series of articles that tackles each of the seven trends and explains how modernization and migration can make them happen. Let’s start with customer experience (CX).

Are you multi-experienced? CX defined

Because of the pandemic, customers have become more dependent on their devices, using them to open a checking account, order restaurant deliveries, plan home renovations, and so on. Customer experience has never been more important. A recent Forrester survey concluded that 88% of IT decision-makers believe that CX will be their competitive differentiator and advantage in 2021.

So, what is CX, exactly? Hundreds of different definitions of customer experience are out on the web. Smarter CX has one we really like: “CX is the creation of memorable and personal interactions so that customers want to spend more time with a particular company.” These interactions deliver a multi-experience journey, whereby customers can engage with the company multiple ways, such as:

• Brick-and-mortar store visits
• On mobile apps
• In social media
• In a web or text chat
• In support forums or contact centers
• Clicking an ad
• Via IoT devices (for example, scanning a QR code to pay for a purchase in a store)

Creating a CX journey that increases engagement and sales

Creating a journey that includes most or all of these interactions is no small feat. A mobile app that is easy to use is often at the heart of it, but you will lose customers if it does not integrate with and behave the same as an ecommerce website or a customer can’t ask questions immediately in a chat, for example. According to Gartner, to deliver the ultimate CX journey, you need scalable development of fit-for-purpose apps that span all the way customers engage--including custom mobile apps, responsive web and PWAs, immersive, and conversational app support.

Gartner’s definition only includes one aspect of delivering CX—how to build applications that make it easy for customers to do business with you or contact you with questions and concerns. It takes more than a snazzy development platform to make sure customers have personal and memorable interactions with your business. Those applications need to connect with your business systems quickly and easily. Therefore, your CX strategy will go nowhere without a modern and agile infrastructure.

Yet, many companies are still using legacy systems to run their business. These systems are often hard-wired, have monolithic architectures that are difficult to change, and are difficult, if not impossible, to integrate with modern technologies. They struggle to work with real-time information and, in some dramatic cases, can’t provide electronic output. Then there’s legacy code. It is often a black box, so trying to integrate it with more modern code can bust your IT budget and exhaust your resources.

Cloud migration and legacy modernization to the CX rescue

The cloud offers the elasticity, reliability, and scalability needed for customer experiences that enable your company to stand out in the competitive crowd. Migrating applications to the cloud with a legacy modernization platform and modern database management system is one of the fastest ways to improve all the ways your customers engage with your company.

The combination of a legacy modernization platform and a modern RDBMS provides customers with modern, easy-to-use, and high-performing interactions—without starting from scratch. This combination is a sensible option that enables organizations to take advantage of cloud’s benefits quickly and painlessly. No workload or application is left behind, and any future applications built in the new infrastructure can use legacy data that is easily accessed.

Create memorable and personal CX with TmaxSoft

Two TmaxSoft products, OpenFrame and Tibero, can provide the legacy modernization platform and RDBMS to help you build the experience your customers crave. Learn more about the benefits of modernizing your infrastructure in this eBook.