The Many Faces Of IT Modernization
October 7, 2024 Alex Woodie
The clarion call of modernization has been heard loud and clear among IBM i and System z shops for decades. Old IT is hampering your competitiveness, they’re told, and something must be done about it. In reality, there’s no single path to modernization, which is a multi-faceted phenomenon that can have wide ranging impacts on the business, Rocket Software says in a new report.
Business transformation is separate from IT transformation, but the two are linked, according to Rocket Software’s new study, titled IT Modernization Without Disruption, which is based on a survey of 309 decision-maker at System Z shops around the world conducted by Forrester Consulting.
Some 69 percent of respondents state that IT modernization is “very or extremely important” when it comes to helping their organization achieve its business objectives over the next 12 months, the study says. In an age of tech- and data-driven insights, legacy systems can act as an anchor.
Source: Rocket study titled “IT Modernization Without Disruption.”
So how can Big Iron shops modernize their systems? That’s where things get a little more dicey.
“There’s a lot of different ways to modernize,” says Phil Buckellew, president of Rocket Software’s infrastructure modernization business unit. “Different people are addressing different problems.”
For instance, 56 percent of respondents in Rocket’s study (which you can download here) said they were modernizing their IT systems by integrating mainframe applications with other applications on the public cloud. Another 27 percent said they were removing applications from the mainframe and moving them to the cloud, while 17 percent said they were leaving the applications on the mainframe but transforming them using the latest features on the mainframe.
The different approaches reflect the large number of variables at play here, including a desire for more IT reliability and resilience (cited by 53 percent of survey respondents); improved IT capabilities to enhance stakeholder experience (cited by 51 percent); and improved access to insights to unlock the value of data (cited by 48 percent). Besides those top-level drivers, there are a host of other factors that come into play, including external business pressures, internal skills issues, and an organization’s overall appetite for risk.
Rocket study, titled “IT Modernization Without Disruption.”
When you drill down into what modernization actually means, you find a world of even more variety. Turning 5250 or 3270 green screens into GUIs is the prototypical “modernization” job on Big Iron systems, but it’s just one of many ways to modernize. Wholesale conversion of COBOL or RPG apps to Java is another. One could also modernize the database (just like IBM i shops, mainframe shops aren’t all using relational databases and SQL standards).
Operationally, there a host of other modernization methods and means. Using modern development tools, having better observability and security, and integrating on-prem with cloud systems (i.e. “hybrid cloud”) for AI and analytics are additional operational considerations to the modernization equation. Maybe the mainframe or IBM i user needs better pipelines to ship data off to external warehouses, which means better ETL and data engineering.
Overall, IBM i and mainframe shops want their platforms to function as less of an island unto themselves. That’s a common theme across modernization discussions, Buckellew says.
“A lot of times people will have good application monitors across their whole stack, and then when they go back to the mainframe or an IBM i environment, it’s kind of a black hole,” he tells IT Jungle. “So that’s something that we’re able to turn the lights on and basically be able to provide some of that information.”
Some organizations may want to stick with COBOL (or RPG), but modernize their development environment, say by ditching legacy tools from IBM and moving to something like VS Code. Other times, it’s the development process itself that needs some help, such as moving from classic waterfall processes to the modern DevOps approach, which brings tools like Git and Jenkins into the equation.
“It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” Buckellew says about the extremely broad topic of modernization. “Everybody’s got to do it for different reasons.”
At any given point, about 60 percent of Rocket’s customers are in the process of modernizing, Buckellew says, citing multiple studies over the years. The latest study from Forrester Consulting found that 74 percent of survey respondents have been on their current modernization journey for more than a year.
You can down Rocket’s report by clicking on this image.
Failure, unfortunately, is part and parcel of the modernization gig. Among the 18 percent of survey respondents who say they are modernizing by rewriting applications to run on the cloud, over half say they have attempted the rewrites at least six times “due to multiple failures.”
“The significant number of failed rewrites implies a low tolerance of risk,” the report says, “though the fact that respondents continued to retry application rewrite projects shows the importance of modernization and the need for solutions to help their organizations modernize without disruption.”
Security and risk concerns weigh heavily on IT decision-makers, with 41 percent of survey respondents citing those concerns as the biggest hindrances to modernization success. Another 38 percent cite lack of skills as the main barrier to successful IT modernization, 33 percent cited integration complexity, while 30 percent said inadequate tools and platforms were in the way.
Big Iron shops are between a rock and a hard place, unfortunately. On the one hand, they have systems that have been customized to meet the needs of the business over many years, and are generally reliable and secure. On the other hand, they’re not as flexible as modern systems, and it’s becoming difficult to adapt them to meet today’s business needs. Rip-and-replace and modernize-in-place both bring risks to scalability, reliability, and security, not to mention multi-million-dollar price tags, while doing nothing risks falling behind to competitors and lost opportunity.
Until mainframe and IBM i shops build up enough modernization scar tissue of their own, they often will lean on the experienced hands of vendors and service providers like Rocket, who have folks with decades of experience. Rocket’s survey found that 40 percent of survey respondents are working with a partner, whether it’s a hyperscaler, a managed service provider, software vendors, or a consultant.
“Modernization expertise is always really important,” Buckellew says. “We’ve been in this business for a long time, well over 30 years, if you consider some of the acquired companies. And we’ve built up the skills to know how to keep these systems that are keeping the planes in the air and the trains running and the credit card swipes happening. So we know how to advise them on how to do this work safely without corruption.”
Despite the risks of failure, mainframe and IBM i shops keep coming back for more modernization. Like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, the job is never done. We will always be modernizing legacy systems, which is good news for folks in the modernization business, like Rocket.
“The fact that so many of our clients are actually taking these steps, it seems to be a pretty healthy market, and clients seem to be getting the kind of results that they need to keep going,” Buckellew says. “If you ask the budget owners, they’re always looking for more.”
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