Stop the Endless Debates About the Mainframe: BYOC @ AWS re:Invent

by Moses Mathuram, Vice President of Global Channels and Partnerships

In the 1970s, it was BYOB. In the mid-2000s, it was BYOD. And, now, in 2018, TmaxSoft announces BYOC—Bring Your Own Code. What exactly is BYOC? It’s your COBOL or PL/I source code and data, lifted and shifted to an open platform with TmaxSoft OpenFrame.

Let me explain. It starts with the troublesome mainframe and ends with an amazing program.

The trouble with the mainframe

Does this scenario ring a bell? A CIO and IT director are in a seemingly endless debate. The topic? It’s what to do about the mainframe. One thing they agree upon: mainframes are a blessing and a curse. Many of the workloads they run are useful, and some are even mission critical, especially in a transaction-heavy business or industry. But, they’re way too expensive to run and maintain. In fact, the expenses of caring for and babying a mainframe can far outweigh its usefulness.

Yet, when there’s talk of modernization, the debate heats up. The CIO wants to modernize. The IT Director points out the issue of dependencies quickly: many applications on the mainframe have been customized, added to, and patched or fixed over time. Everything could break if a dependency is forgotten. Meanwhile, someone else, possibly a CFO, joins the debate, talking about capital expenses in a negative tone. Surely, it’s better just to keep supporting the mainframe, they argue.

But the fact of the matter is that the CIO pushing for innovation is right in this case. Modernizing IT and business applications is the way forward for any enterprise that wants to keep its competitive edge sharp. And, the mainframe is the biggest hurdle to modernization of all kinds—business, apps, responsiveness to customers. It cannot adapt to the agile and DevOps world where IT organizations can rapidly develop, integrate, and release applications weekly, if not daily. Where the CIO gets tripped up is the issue of how to modernize and which alternatives to choose.

But are the alternatives any better?

IT Directors, meanwhile, believe that alternatives to the mainframe are unreliable, take a long time, or both. They are not totally incorrect. The three major options are rewriting, code conversion, and rehosting. CIOs, on the other hand, are willing to try them—often to their detriment.

Rewriting can take ages. Recently, a CIO got in touch with TmaxSoft for help. He had spent 18 months and a huge amount of money on rewriting. In all that time, only 1/10 of his code had been rewritten. Another aspect of rewriting is that someone must accurately define the requirements and the business logic because the people who wrote the mainframe code are long gone. However, with the originators out of the picture, can the requirements and business logic be captured completely and correctly?

Then there’s code conversion. In a nutshell, it’s painfully incorrect. Despite all claims to the contrary, code conversion tools fall woefully short of accurate conversion. The result is a tedious and painful process of trying to find the inaccuracies, which can sometimes take longer than actually rewriting them.

So, what about that third option?

Rehosting is less risky than code conversion and less expensive and time-consuming than rewriting. Rehosting with TmaxSoft OpenFrame, in particular, enables enterprises to move their mainframe applications confidently and run them on modern cloud-based infrastructure without any change to code or business logic. And with OpenFrame APIs, they can rapidly embrace digital transformation.

Endless vs. quick: You decide

While CIOs and IT Directors debate endlessly, to help resolve the deadlock, TmaxSoft has come up with a quick solution. You can try rehosting with OpenFrame for free now. For AWS re:Invent 2018, TmaxSoft has launched a unique, never-before-seen BYOC program. Securely provide us with your source code and datasets, and we will show your application running on OpenFrame on the AWS cloud at AWS re:Invent.

That’s right. You can see OpenFrame running your source code on the cloud, along with all the performance parameters. You can check this link for further details. If you want us to call you, reach out to me directly at moses.mathuram@tmaxsoft.com.

If you are attending AWS re:Invent, we can schedule both a demo and a discussion with our CEO. We will be at booth #635.

What are you waiting for?