The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2022 – user survey findings

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2022 is now available for download from https://itech-ed.com/arcati/ – and it’s FREE. Each new Yearbook is always greeted with enthusiasm by mainframers everywhere because it is such a unique source of information. And each year, many people find the results of the user survey especially interesting.

This year, the results came from the 100 respondents who completed the survey on the Arcati Web site between 20 October 2021 and the 26 November 2021. Just over half (53 percent) were from North America. 21 percent were from the Asia/Pacific region, with only a tenth of respondents from Europe. 10 percent were from the Middle East/Africa, and five percent were from South America.

The largest group of respondents were from companies with over 10,000 employees worldwide (37 percent). Almost a third (32 percent) had 1001 to 5000 staff. 11 percent had 5001 to 10,000 employees. And 10 percent comprised companies with under 200 staff and staff sizes of 201 to 1000.

It was an interesting survey this year to see how various sites are adopting the new technologies that seem to come out every year and how the world of the mainframe seems to be integrating with cloud computing in a hybrid environment. Clearly, working with mainframes is an interesting way to spend your day – particularly as they are able to reach out to mobile devices and the cloud, and, with DevOps, they can speed up what was a very slow process of application development. CICS and IMS continue to have quarterly updates that add value to the product.

In terms of what’s new (or, perhaps more correctly, what appears on a lot of PowerPoint slides), the survey found that 31 percent of sites are already using Splunk or equivalent. And a further 19 percent said that they were planning to use it. The survey found that 44 percent of sites were already using DevOps (up from 35 percent last year), with a further 39 percent (up from 15 percent last year) planning to use it. And 53 percent of all respondents said that they were already reusing APIs to speed up application development. And a further 14 percent of sites are planning to reuse APIs. Blockchain has been in the news a lot, but seemed less popular this year. No sites reported already using it, and only eight percent are planning to use it. With Docker, we found that 17 percent of respondents were already using it (up from 10 percent last year) with 33 percent at the planning stage.

Zowe, the open-source way of accessing mainframes, was introduced in 2018. 19 percent of sites said that they are already using this open-source technology, with a massive 50 percent of sites having plans to make use of it in the coming year. Open-source technology is now becoming commonplace on mainframes.

When it comes to Web-enabling subsystems, we found that 75 percent of organizations were Web-enabling CICS. 50 percent of sites are Web-enabling Db2. 45 percent of sites are Web-enabling IMS. 30 percent are Web-enabling WebSphere Application Server. We also found that only eight percent of sites already use Liberty, with 18 percent planning to install it.

Mainframes in an organization are just one of the computing platforms people use (along with phones, tablets, laptops, Power systems, etc), and, for a long time, there has been an issue, at many sites, with mainframes being accepted in the enterprise. The reason suggested by 85 percent of sites was that the biggest obstacle was the difficulty in retaining the necessary skills. And this, perhaps, highlights the need for a product like Zowe. 55 percent of sites thought that the biggest obstacles to mainframe acceptance within the enterprise was that it’s too expensive (or appears to be). The figure was 90 percent last year. 50 percent thought the biggest obstacle was a cultural barrier between mainframe and other IT professionals (up from 40 percent last year). 30 percent felt concerns about future availability/support of mainframe apps was an obstacle. 25 percent of respondents thought that a barrier was the mainframe being too complex (or appearing to be too complex). And five percent of respondents didn’t think that there were any barriers to mainframe acceptance. Let’s hope that last figure rises in the future.

Reinforcing the value of the mainframe to organizations, the survey found that 66 percent of sites have seen some kind of increase in capacity, and 75 percent have seen an increase in technology costs, and yet only 54 percent of sites believe their people costs have increased! Interestingly, 56 percent of sites say that the bulk of their IT budget is spent on cloud, leaving 44 percent of sites where the majority of their expenditure is on the mainframe. We’ll track how those values change over the next few years.

But no organization is going to develop an asset unless they view it as having a future, and we all know the mindset that still exists about the mainframe, treating it as little more than your dad’s technology. Unfortunately, the survey found that 39 percent of sites viewed their mainframe as a legacy system. Worryingly, only 17 percent (well down from last year’s figure of 40 percent) still viewed mainframes as strategic. 44 percent viewed mainframes as strategic and legacy!

When asked what, in their opinion, are the main benefits to their organization of the mainframe over other platforms, 95 percent of respondents highlighted the benefit of availability. 85 percent of respondents highlighted security. This figure is down from the 100 percent response last year, and yet breaches and ransomware still should be a major concern. 65 percent of respondents identified scalability, with 55 percent highlighting manageability.

This year’s survey found that the last mainframe model (rather than the current) was the most prevalent. So, z15 is the most popular model (at 40 percent of sites), followed by the original z14 at 30 percent of sites, and the z14 Model ZR1 at 25 percent of sites. The newer z15T02 models exist at only five percent of sites. The older models (z13s, z13, z12BC, z12 EC, and z114) are still out there and still performing well. It must be noted, when looking at these statistics, that many sites had more than one model of mainframe installed. In terms of operating system, 57 percent of sites are using Version 2.4, and 29 percent were using z/OS Version 2.3. A further seven percent were using the newer Version 2.5. I imagine the prevalence of Covid and lockdowns may have moved many sites’ focus away from upgrading their mainframe and operating system.

We focused this year on hybrid cloud computing. 21 percent of respondents currently used their mainframe in a hybrid cloud environment. A further 21 percent think that they will run a hybrid cloud environment at some time in the future, with 11 percent planning to run a hybrid cloud environment soon. nearly half of sites (47 percent) don’t use hybrid cloud and don’t have any plans to do so. We asked whether respondents use Red Hat OpenShift and/or IBM Cloud Paks on their mainframe. Only 13 percent of sites said yes, with nearly a third suggesting that they have plans to do so. We also asked which cloud providers mainframe sites used. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the most popular at 28 percent, followed by Azure at 19 percent.

Linux is often in the news, so it was interesting to see what our respondents had to say about it. There are considerable cost and management benefits from consolidating distributed Linux workloads onto the mainframe. However, 77 percent of respondents weren’t interested in LinuxONE mainframes. No sites said they already had one, with 15 percent expecting to get one at some time in the future, and eight percent expecting to get one in the next year. No sites in the survey said their primary operating system was Linux. Having said that, 39 percent of respondents said that they run Linux on IBM Z.

Security breaches and ransomware are becoming a major issue – with the average breach costing $4.24 million. Perhaps worryingly, 61 percent of respondents said that they weren’t worried about ransomware. No-one said they had a solution in place, although 39 percent were worried or very worried about it. So, good news for criminal gangs and rogue nation state hackers!

As is so often the case, the bottom line is that the mainframe continues to offer a cost-effective, secure (especially with pervasive encryption), and powerful platform for organizations with the necessary background and expertise in place to support it. It seems that non-mainframe IT staff and managers are not getting the opportunities to find out about the multitude of advantages that using a mainframe can bring to an organization – in terms of security, reliability, availability, flexibility, as well as understanding the true total cost of ownership figures for the platform. Perhaps Zowe will continue to help the mainframe to appear like any other server to a younger generation of programmers and managers.