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Renewing the Mainframe

April Hickel
BMC

Many have assumed that the mainframe is a dying entity, but instead, a mainframe renaissance is underway. Despite this notion, we are ushering in a future of more strategic investments, increased capacity, and leading innovations. Fast-growing organizations are meeting this progression with new approaches to improve their agility and speed while entirely integrating the mainframe within their enterprise systems and mechanisms.

According to the 2022 BMC Mainframe Survey, a study conducted of more than 1,000 mainframe and IT professionals globally, over 60% of respondents reported that their investment in the platform is increasing. These increases tie directly to changing workloads on the platform as transaction and data volumes and the number of databases increase more rapidly — and unpredictably — than ever before. This only further illustrates that capacity is growing across all sizes of mainframe shops.

To set the pace, strong organizations have strategically integrated their mainframe with their enterprise processes. Enterprises are prioritizing their efforts on developing software more quickly and more often. They are also achieving higher quality releases with DevOps and AIOps to improve performance, availability, security, and compliance to effectively secure mainframe environments. Mainframes play a valuable role in enterprise innovation to deliver real-world results. The survey shows that adopters of AIOps and DevOps are seeing clear value from their investments, and the adoption of new tools and processes in key areas like DevOps, DevSecOps, and AIOps all increased from the previous year.

Additional survey findings include:

■ 65% of respondents report the combined use of AIOps in their mainframe and distributed environments. With the increase in AIOps adoption, more enterprises include mainframes in their enterprise wide AIOps initiatives, reinforcing the mainframe as a valuable platform for innovation.

■ 70% of large organizations reported DevOps use within their mainframe environment.

■ For the third year, security and compliance lead the list of priorities for mainframe organizations, with 67% of respondents citing both as top issues, a 6% increase over last year.

In AIOps, adoption is growing as implementation barriers decline. The mainframe is moving firmly into enterprise AIOps, as witnessed by the decreased use in non-mainframe environments and increased use in combined environments. The adoption of DevOps on the mainframe also continues to be a trend, as DevOps and collaboration deliver real-world results.

Finally, there is a growing awareness of the need to effectively secure mainframe environments, especially as the mainframe becomes a more integral part of enterprise security initiatives.

A Familiar Interface for Mainframe Development

Timely responses are a must when meeting the expectations of large companies. The survey shows that four out of five organizations look to update applications more often, with 14% updating their mainframe applications each day. However, attracting, onboarding, and retaining talent can be a challenge. Older mainframe code can be complicated and a majority of colleges and universities have abandoned the "green screen" teaching method in modern integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio Code (VS Code). As a matter of fact, the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey found that almost 75% of respondents said they used VS Code in the past year and plan on continuing to work with it in the future.

In order to meet expectations for faster software delivery life cycles and beat staffing challenges, companies are integrating tools that get rid of obstructions that prevent a wider array of developers from accessing the mainframe. It holds true that developers should be able to leverage interfaces that are easy to comprehend and utilize while having the ability to troubleshoot code on even the most advanced systems.

An improved developer experience not only helps attract new talent to the mainframe; it also gives both new and seasoned developers a familiar environment to work in, decreasing onboarding time and enabling them to be more productive, faster.

The Renaissance Prevails

The mainframe platform is evolving at a rapid pace as more organizations apply an open-borders approach that utilizes mainframe, distributed, and cloud systems across applications. It is essential to fully integrate the mainframe with enterprise development and operations practices to ensure agility, resilience, and security while making work on the mainframe seamless.

April Hickel is VP, Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation, at BMC

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Renewing the Mainframe

April Hickel
BMC

Many have assumed that the mainframe is a dying entity, but instead, a mainframe renaissance is underway. Despite this notion, we are ushering in a future of more strategic investments, increased capacity, and leading innovations. Fast-growing organizations are meeting this progression with new approaches to improve their agility and speed while entirely integrating the mainframe within their enterprise systems and mechanisms.

According to the 2022 BMC Mainframe Survey, a study conducted of more than 1,000 mainframe and IT professionals globally, over 60% of respondents reported that their investment in the platform is increasing. These increases tie directly to changing workloads on the platform as transaction and data volumes and the number of databases increase more rapidly — and unpredictably — than ever before. This only further illustrates that capacity is growing across all sizes of mainframe shops.

To set the pace, strong organizations have strategically integrated their mainframe with their enterprise processes. Enterprises are prioritizing their efforts on developing software more quickly and more often. They are also achieving higher quality releases with DevOps and AIOps to improve performance, availability, security, and compliance to effectively secure mainframe environments. Mainframes play a valuable role in enterprise innovation to deliver real-world results. The survey shows that adopters of AIOps and DevOps are seeing clear value from their investments, and the adoption of new tools and processes in key areas like DevOps, DevSecOps, and AIOps all increased from the previous year.

Additional survey findings include:

■ 65% of respondents report the combined use of AIOps in their mainframe and distributed environments. With the increase in AIOps adoption, more enterprises include mainframes in their enterprise wide AIOps initiatives, reinforcing the mainframe as a valuable platform for innovation.

■ 70% of large organizations reported DevOps use within their mainframe environment.

■ For the third year, security and compliance lead the list of priorities for mainframe organizations, with 67% of respondents citing both as top issues, a 6% increase over last year.

In AIOps, adoption is growing as implementation barriers decline. The mainframe is moving firmly into enterprise AIOps, as witnessed by the decreased use in non-mainframe environments and increased use in combined environments. The adoption of DevOps on the mainframe also continues to be a trend, as DevOps and collaboration deliver real-world results.

Finally, there is a growing awareness of the need to effectively secure mainframe environments, especially as the mainframe becomes a more integral part of enterprise security initiatives.

A Familiar Interface for Mainframe Development

Timely responses are a must when meeting the expectations of large companies. The survey shows that four out of five organizations look to update applications more often, with 14% updating their mainframe applications each day. However, attracting, onboarding, and retaining talent can be a challenge. Older mainframe code can be complicated and a majority of colleges and universities have abandoned the "green screen" teaching method in modern integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio Code (VS Code). As a matter of fact, the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey found that almost 75% of respondents said they used VS Code in the past year and plan on continuing to work with it in the future.

In order to meet expectations for faster software delivery life cycles and beat staffing challenges, companies are integrating tools that get rid of obstructions that prevent a wider array of developers from accessing the mainframe. It holds true that developers should be able to leverage interfaces that are easy to comprehend and utilize while having the ability to troubleshoot code on even the most advanced systems.

An improved developer experience not only helps attract new talent to the mainframe; it also gives both new and seasoned developers a familiar environment to work in, decreasing onboarding time and enabling them to be more productive, faster.

The Renaissance Prevails

The mainframe platform is evolving at a rapid pace as more organizations apply an open-borders approach that utilizes mainframe, distributed, and cloud systems across applications. It is essential to fully integrate the mainframe with enterprise development and operations practices to ensure agility, resilience, and security while making work on the mainframe seamless.

April Hickel is VP, Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation, at BMC

Hot Topics

The Latest

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...