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Workers with COBOL knowledge are retiring, driving enterprise interest in mainframe modernization
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Amdocs thinks automation can not only help refactoring go faster but it can help the reformed applications scale better
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IBM — once the mainframe giant — is working to beef up its own migration capabilities
The tables have finally turned. As more employees with legacy skills retire without replacements entering the workforce, the risk-reward paradigm that kept enterprises on the mainframe has officially shifted. Now, a tidal wave of mainframe modernization projects is building, but Amdocs told Silverlinings enterprises won’t get very far without automation.
One of the big problems with mainframe infrastructure is that it is generally built on COBOL, a more than half-century old programming language. And those with knowledge of COBOL are increasingly heading for the door, leaving enterprises with a critical gap.
“Baby boomers, people born between 1946 and ’64, are now retiring and that’s causing risk to stay on the mainframe," said Scott Silk, CEO of Astadia, a mainframe modernization company acquired by Amdocs at the end of last year.
"If you’re Jamie Dimon running JP Morgan Chase and your people capital are walking out the door, that puts your whole enterprise at risk," Silk said.
There are a few different ways to go about mainframe modernization, including rehosting, replatforming, rearchitecting and refactoring, he told us.
The “gold standard” for upgrades used to be the lift and shift rehosting reapproach — through which companies would move their COBOL-based applications and just plop them in the cloud still in COBOL — because it was faster and viewed as lower risk than something like refactoring.
Now, companies are realizing that COBOL itself is the problem and unless they refactor their applications into more modern languages like Java and C#, they haven’t solved the issue threatening their most critical workloads. Plus, they could be missing out on opportunities to improve those applications with cloud-native technologies.
The thing is, refactoring old COBOL applications is hard. That’s where automation comes in. And the more automation, the better, Silk said.
“If you have a refactoring tool that automates 60% of the project, then you manually have to do other 40%, and when you do that you have two code bases. And when you have two code bases, you have to integrate them and it’s expensive and it doesn’t scale or perform particularly well,” he said.
Mainframe modernization mayhem
Ok, so just how widespread is the mainframe modernization issue? Well, some outlets have estimated there are more than 10,000 mainframes still in use. Silk put the number higher, at more than 20,000.
A 2022 report from mainframe modernization company Advanced found mainframe-based applications contain of an average of 3.6 million lines of code. In short, there’s a lot of work on the horizon.
Amdocs VP Guy Hilton said for its part, the company plans to use its newly acquired Astadia assets to target the telecom and financial services verticals. These, he said, account for roughly 75% of the mainframes remaining today.
As their migrations progress, Hilton said customers often end up faced with questions such as ‘What is my overall cloud strategy?' ‘How do I build a landing zone?’ ‘How do I tackle analytics and DevSecOps?’
He said Amdocs will be looking for ways to address these questions with products from the rest of its portfolio.
“Naturally that will create new types of services offerings, so a full-blown mainframe migration service offering from Amdocs built on Astadia’s capabilities and complemented by the rest of our portfolio,” Hilton concluded. “We can’t disclose it yet, we have a few other service offerings that rely on the same capabilities that we’ll publish probably in the next year.”
Moving and shaking
According to a September 2023 report from IT consulting firm Kyndryl, 95% of 500 financial services, retail, healthcare, insurance, transportation and government organizations surveyed for the study plan to move some applications off the mainframe. The same percentage said they plan to move at least some of their workloads to the cloud, and 85% said their migration journey is in progress or has only just begun.
IBM, the old mainframe titan, isn’t blind to this trend. It debuted watsonx Code Assistant for Z last year to help companies refactor their old COBOL apps. Last week, it acquired application modernization capabilities from Advanced for an undisclosed sum to help flesh out its mainframe modernization portfolio. Amazon Web Services and Ensono also offer mainframe modernization options.