Although mainframes have existed for over 60 years, their reliability and processing power are still used to host business-critical apps and data.
However, as these systems age, businesses face escalating maintenance costs, diminishing pools of expertise and increasingly complex integrations with modern technologies.
To address these issues, leaders need to embrace applications modernisation. But what’s the best approach? And how can they avoid costly failures when transforming?
Verena Bierig, senior product portfolio manager at LzLabs, and Andy Askew, board advisor, offer insights into the benefits of Lzlabs’ technologies and an incremental approach to modernisation – one that minimises risk while unlocking cost savings, improved agility and the ability to innovate at scale.
What typically stops companies from embarking on modernisation?
Modernisation involves core applications and data that the business runs on, so it comes with a certain amount of risk.
People ask themselves, ‘Is it really necessary to do this now? Or can we delay it for a bit?’ Essentially, there’s a fear of failing.
Historically, many transformation projects have failed. Even if you’ve not experienced that yourself, just hearing about those failures might cause you to delay taking action.
How have approaches to modernisation evolved in recent years?
There’s a broader range of solutions available today. LzLabs wasn’t around 15 years ago, for example, when people were trying and failing to make changes to their applications. So, the technology stack has moved on.
Leveraging the new world of modern IT – AI, the cloud – to be more responsive and gain competitive advantage is also at the top of IT’s agenda.
So while traditionally the attitude might have been, to quote MC Hammer, ‘You can’t touch this’, things have moved on.
Is the pressure to modernise increasing?
Concerns about an ageing workforce, increased costs and the lack of agility have been around for 20 years, these issues are only getting worse as time goes on.
Moving into the cloud and embracing cloud-first strategies addresses this skills issue, as it enables you to access a whole new world of IT resources.
How does LzLabs’ approach to modernisation address these issues?
Ours and other solutions address both companies’ concerns about migration and the pressure to act.
Because you can move things incrementally, supported by our APIs and connections [with the mainframe], it reduces risk and means there’s no need to change everything simultaneously.
We work with clients who may not completely exit their mainframe platform. They may want to extract some workloads, applications, or data layers and expose them to innovation. But to remain interoperable with the applications in that scenario, you need the bi-directionality that we offer.
How do companies typically begin their modernisation journey?
They often start by analysing their environment to see what it actually looks like, then move on to more detailed planning once they understand what [applications, data and workloads] they currently have in place.
Once you know all the pieces that you need to address through the transformation, you can then prioritise them on a timeline before you move into the implementation phase.
At that really high level, it’s quite a similar approach for each customer. But the transformation path soon becomes very unique because these environments have grown up over many, many years, and they’ve become more and more individual.
You’re never going to have exactly the same configuration with each customer…there are often decades and decades of layered complexity. We act as a trusted advisor that understands that complexity and can help you navigate it successfully.
What applications might a company modernise first when taking an incremental approach to modernisation?
AA: It may well be that we start by looking at the data within an application workload and how we can liberate that and make it more available outside of the mainframe, which opens it up to things like AI and BI.
There is a business side to the equation, too. What might you need to liberate to take advantage of better integration synergies? To expose the app more in your systems of innovation and engagement rather than it being a system of record?
Just by moving to our solution, the data is available to modern systems in an easier-to-digest format. The applications store data in one way, and that’s neither good nor bad.
Modern systems store data in a different sorting format, and we act as the bridge so that both can see the data in the format native to them.
With the interoperability we provide, you don’t even have to change the whole application in one go: you can just change part of an application to solve a particular business problem.
By taking that incremental approach, you are also creating proof points of successful outcomes, which builds confidence within the organisation to take further advantage of the technology.
What example do you have of a customer who has undertaken incremental modernisation and achieved success?
We worked with one automotive manufacturer that has an application which checks if a truck, car or other vehicle can be built to certain customer specifications, as well as how long it will take to deliver.
The sales team that used the app found it was taking a long time to get a response because the mainframe had limited capacity for processing these requests, which affected sales and customer service.
Migrating the application to our technologies and processing these requests there resulted in much quicker response times and the ability to run the application at any time, improving both the customer and the seller experience.
The project also resulted in a substantial reduction in application operating costs, and it wasn’t a huge risk for the company because they were – and are – still operating a mainframe.
They could easily have moved the application back again, of course, they don’t want to because it’s performing so much better now.
For more information on overcoming the legacy tech burden visit: www.lzlabs.com
Although mainframes have existed for over 60 years, their reliability and processing power are still used to host business-critical apps and data.
However, as these systems age, businesses face escalating maintenance costs, diminishing pools of expertise and increasingly complex integrations with modern technologies.
To address these issues, leaders need to embrace applications modernisation. But what’s the best approach? And how can they avoid costly failures when transforming?
