Developing Your Modern Mainframe Strategy

In the race to the cloud, mainframes are easily overlooked and relegated to second-class status. Yet these proven enterprise workhorses continue to provide unmatched transaction and database processing for many crucial backend and customer-facing applications. Selectively modernizing foundational mainframe infrastructure and integrating it into the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline has thus become a strategic imperative for many enterprises. Coupled with DevOps and modern development tools using API wrappers, containers, and microservices architectures, mainframe modernization can hugely improve developer experience and productivity while giving firms a reliable and more economical environment for today’s workloads.

In May 2022, BMC commissioned Forrester Consulting to explore key topics and the state of mainframe infrastructure modernization, especially on software development and the role of DevOps. We surveyed 423 IT director-level and above decision-makers or influencers who work at companies across 20 industries in North America and Europe with revenue above US$200 million. Our research found that mainframe decision-makers are learning from other areas of the organization, and they are prioritizing organizational changes to their processes along with technological ones to modernize their mainframe organizations.