The mainframe computer turns 60 on Sunday, but the tireless workhorse of enterprise technology isn’t ready for retirement just yet.
Even as cloud erodes the platform’s once dominant enterprise position and talent attrition becomes a pressing concern, the mainframe remains a cornerstone of the financial industry, processing a lion’s share of the more than 150 million worldwide credit card transactions banks handle each day.
“It’s hard to book a train, book a plane or swipe your credit card and not interact with a mainframe,” said Petra Goude, global practice leader, core enterprise and zCloud, at Kyndryl.
The IT infrastructure services provider, spun-off by IBM in 2021, employs roughly 7,500 mainframe specialists, Goude said. To further stave off skills shortages, Kyndryl adds 100 early professional hires to the team each year.
Periodic reports of the technology’s imminent demise have, as the saying goes, been greatly exaggerated.
According to IBM, more than three-quarters of the top 100 banks are mainframe shops and IBM Z systems account for roughly 70% of global transactions by volume, Tina Tarquinio, VP of product management for IBM Z and LinuxONE, said.
The technology’s footprint extends beyond banking, a recent Forrester State of Mainframes report found.
Last year, as enterprise mainframe budgets grew in line with other infrastructure spending, nearly two-thirds of hardware decision-makers leaned on mainframe compute. Mainframe usage was slightly higher among respondents in business services, transportation, construction and manufacturing, the analyst firm said.
“Great technology doesn't really go away — it finds the niche that it was made for,” Forrester Senior Analyst Brent Ellis said.
“There will be a place for large, monolithic workloads on privately hosted infrastructure for a long time,” Ellis said, pointing to changes in financial processes that haven’t shifted banking’s underlying imperatives.
“We don’t write checks anymore and we aren’t only banking from nine to five, Monday through Friday,” he said. “But the idea of having a financial transaction that is closed and recognized as closed across all potential viewers of the transaction — that hasn't changed.”
Not your parents’ infrastructure
IBM rolled out the System/360, a platform that unified a family of computers under a single architecture, on April 7, 1964, introducing the first commercially available mainframe.
The key innovation was software portability. Code written on one machine could run on any other, establishing an unbroken lineage of compute that traces all the way up to today’s z16, the newest member of the family.
“A program which ran 60 years ago, can run today without changing anything,” Vincent Alloo, head of technology at software provider Zetaly, said. “We are extracting technical data from mainframes that was created decades ago and it’s still usable.”
While the legacy COBOL code remains the same, the container it comes in has evolved significantly and the machines processing the ones and zeros bear only a passing resemblance to the System/360 line.
“This is not the same box that was created 60 years ago,” Ellis said. “While COBOL has been an amazing success from an application standpoint, the underlying infrastructure running the COBOL applications has changed significantly over the years.”
With each iteration, IBM has made Z system hardware sleeker, faster and more powerful, aligning the modern mainframe more closely with its cloud server analogues. The company prioritized two capability upgrades in the z16 when it was released two years ago, Tarquinio said:
- Embed an AI-optimized processors and model deployment architecture
- Introduce the industry’s first quantum-safe cryptography system
“If you look at an Amazon, Microsoft or Google data center and you squint, what you see is not all that different from modernized mainframe systems,” said Steve Tuck, cofounder and CEO of Oxide Computer Company.
Oxide launched in 2019 with a private cloud solution that looks suspiciously like a modern mainframe. “We don’t want to run away from that kind of evolved mainframe thought in how Oxide is delivering modern computing on premises,” Tuck acknowledged.
IBM’s strategy remains firmly aligned with interoperability between cloud and mainframe, a hybrid approach that the company extended to generative AI.
There are three planned hardware Z series updates, Ellis said, which is the equivalent of ten years worth of hardware upgrades. Software vendors have committed to providing updates through 2050, he said.
A mainframe skills scare
The tech stack and the infrastructure it runs on aren’t likely to give out anytime soon, according to most analysts, but industry insiders aren’t so sanguine about the mainframe workforce.
Mainframe operation skills gaps have been a concern for over two decades, according to Forrester, as seasoned experts reach retirement age.
“We can run every application on the mainframe and we can develop in any language,” Alloo said. “But system administration skills are difficult because these are specific skills that don’t exist for other IT infrastructure.”
COBOL programming proficiencies have been a particular pain point for enterprises, although generative AI tools like IBM’s watsonX Code Assistant for Z have provided a ray of hope.
The scope of concern is reflected in IBM’s recent move to convene a mainframe skills council and deploy Z systems skill-building training platform. The company also maintains a robust badging and certification ecosphere, which Gartner Senior Director Analyst Alessandro Galimberti said has made a dent in the shortage.
“It is a very good program, but it's never enough because there is a huge gap now,” Galimberti said.
What makes a potential talent shortage so concerning is the breadth and the types of workloads on enterprise mainframes. Gartner estimates half of critical applications will reside outside of public cloud through 2027.
“If a customer runs a mainframe, you can be almost 100% certain they run their most mission critical work on it,” Goude said.
Talent shortages are rampant in many crucial technologies, including cloud, AI and cyber. But the situation is unique with mainframe skills, according to John McKenny, SVP and general manager of intelligent Z optimization and transformation at BMC Software.
A finite set of organizations running mainframes translates to a smaller group of companies hiring talent, McKenny said. But, he said, “it’s not an issue about the availability of mainframe skills: it’s about companies being ready to invest in recruiting and creating the right environment for young technologists.”
BMC has seen the percentage of mainframe workers under the age of 30 increasing while those over 50 begin leaving the workforce. The number of women in the field has increased, too, McKenny said.
“In the next two to three years we’re going to see a generation change within the mainframe system,” McKenny said. “That's creating more interest in transformative change than I've seen in many years.”
Correction: This story has been corrected to clarify Brett Ellis's comments that software vendors have committed to providing updates through 2050.
