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IT Professionals Foresee Long-Term Viability of Mainframe

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Even as many organizations continue to adopt multi-cloud technologies as part of their dramatic transformation, the mainframe remains a relevant and growing data center hub for many, according to BMC's 12th annual Mainframe Research Report.

The survey highlights that organizations are committed to the mainframe, as respondents are modernizing their operations and technologies, have a more positive attitude toward the mainframe, and are changing their workforce to ensure the right staffing and skills are on board.

"Results from the 2017 BMC Mainframe Research Report provide a good indicator on the future health and viability of the mainframe," said Bill Miller, President of ZSolutions at BMC. "The survey shatters a prevailing variety of myths and highlights the strategic importance of the mainframe. Overwhelmingly, it is clear that the mainframe is a critical core IT platform that is the backbone of digital business.”

With 91% of survey respondents predicting that mainframe workloads will continue to grow, it’s clear that they view the mainframe as a viable, long-term platform.

While many priorities remained unchanged from last year’s survey, staffing and skills leaped forward as a key priority as respondents modernize their mainframe environment. This year, 44% of respondents indicate that staffing and skills are key challenges due to the changing workforce, and 36% of respondents indicate this is a priority in the coming year.

Modernizing Operations

Dispelling the myth that the mainframe is fully optimized and in maintenance mode, the survey results indicate that organizations are modernizing their operations.

With 66% of respondents indicating that they will focus on planned outages to increase availability, the survey dispels the myth that organizations have fully optimized their mainframes. The top applications running on the mainframe are transactional systems, big data, and analytics, and organizations continue to focus on increasing availability.

Evolving Attitudes, Changing Workforce

Attitudes about the mainframe also continue to evolve. Contrary to the perception that executives want to replace mainframes, many recognize that mainframes are a critical core IT platform. In this year’s results, 47% of executives indicate they will grow and attract new workloads.

The survey dispels several myths about the mainframe workforce, including the perception that mainframe professionals are all older in age, while younger IT professionals are pessimistic about the mainframe industry’s prospects.

■ 53% of respondents are under the age of 50, and many of these respondents have a positive view of the mainframe.

■ 69% of those in the mid-career group (ages 30 to 49 with one to ten years of experience), see growth in their mainframe workloads and view the mainframe as having a strong position of growth in the industry overall.

■ Millennials under the age of 30 are very enthusiastic about the future of the mainframe.

"Mainframe applications and databases provide critical business services as organizations undergo modernization and digital transformation," said Tim Grieser, Research VP, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC.

Methodology: 1,069 respondents were surveyed online from May 16 to June 4, 2017. The survey was sent worldwide and was offered in six languages, English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. Sixty-two percent of the respondents were technical professionals and managers, 34% were executives, and 4% were other.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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IT Professionals Foresee Long-Term Viability of Mainframe

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Even as many organizations continue to adopt multi-cloud technologies as part of their dramatic transformation, the mainframe remains a relevant and growing data center hub for many, according to BMC's 12th annual Mainframe Research Report.

The survey highlights that organizations are committed to the mainframe, as respondents are modernizing their operations and technologies, have a more positive attitude toward the mainframe, and are changing their workforce to ensure the right staffing and skills are on board.

"Results from the 2017 BMC Mainframe Research Report provide a good indicator on the future health and viability of the mainframe," said Bill Miller, President of ZSolutions at BMC. "The survey shatters a prevailing variety of myths and highlights the strategic importance of the mainframe. Overwhelmingly, it is clear that the mainframe is a critical core IT platform that is the backbone of digital business.”

With 91% of survey respondents predicting that mainframe workloads will continue to grow, it’s clear that they view the mainframe as a viable, long-term platform.

While many priorities remained unchanged from last year’s survey, staffing and skills leaped forward as a key priority as respondents modernize their mainframe environment. This year, 44% of respondents indicate that staffing and skills are key challenges due to the changing workforce, and 36% of respondents indicate this is a priority in the coming year.

Modernizing Operations

Dispelling the myth that the mainframe is fully optimized and in maintenance mode, the survey results indicate that organizations are modernizing their operations.

With 66% of respondents indicating that they will focus on planned outages to increase availability, the survey dispels the myth that organizations have fully optimized their mainframes. The top applications running on the mainframe are transactional systems, big data, and analytics, and organizations continue to focus on increasing availability.

Evolving Attitudes, Changing Workforce

Attitudes about the mainframe also continue to evolve. Contrary to the perception that executives want to replace mainframes, many recognize that mainframes are a critical core IT platform. In this year’s results, 47% of executives indicate they will grow and attract new workloads.

The survey dispels several myths about the mainframe workforce, including the perception that mainframe professionals are all older in age, while younger IT professionals are pessimistic about the mainframe industry’s prospects.

■ 53% of respondents are under the age of 50, and many of these respondents have a positive view of the mainframe.

■ 69% of those in the mid-career group (ages 30 to 49 with one to ten years of experience), see growth in their mainframe workloads and view the mainframe as having a strong position of growth in the industry overall.

■ Millennials under the age of 30 are very enthusiastic about the future of the mainframe.

"Mainframe applications and databases provide critical business services as organizations undergo modernization and digital transformation," said Tim Grieser, Research VP, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC.

Methodology: 1,069 respondents were surveyed online from May 16 to June 4, 2017. The survey was sent worldwide and was offered in six languages, English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. Sixty-two percent of the respondents were technical professionals and managers, 34% were executives, and 4% were other.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...