Despite years of predictions that mainframes would pass from the scene, enterprise platforms and applications, such as IBM Z and IBM i, are not only thriving but also still crunching 90% of all credit card purchases and running 68% of production workloads. What’s more, the need for the mainframe’s highly available and resource-optimized architecture shows no signs of abating.

“The mainframe is the backbone of the world economy, not because of incumbency but because of the value the platform provides,” says Steve Nekolaichuk, global offering manager for Core Enterprise and zCloud at Kyndryl.

However, organizations that rely on these sturdy platforms have felt pressure to migrate to platforms that are perceived as more modern. That would make sense if mainframes had stopped evolving 50 years ago. But as the research shows, “big iron” has not only kept pace with the speed of technology advancement but, in some cases, has also exceeded it by a wide margin.

“At nearly every level of the technology stack, the perceived complexity of the mainframe is masked by open solutions and new platform features,” Nekolaichuk says.

Kyndryl is a specialized business with deep mainframe experience that provides services that keep these powerful processors in optimal condition, replatforms applications where it makes sense, and even offers mainframe processing as a service.

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