AI is all the rage!

Perhaps no surprises there. Pixel phones now come with Gemini. My video editing software has AI integration. My Opera browser comes with AI. Just about everything has some sort of AI integrated. So, it won’t come as a shock to find mainframers are as keen on AI as everyone else.

That’s what Kyndryl are telling us based on the results of their recent State of Mainframe Modernization Survey. They say that 2024 is the year of AI adoption on the mainframe. The survey also found that modernization projects are delivering significant financial benefits, however, many organizations face skills shortages, preventing the transformation of complex mission-critical systems. Although, to be honest, that may be a good thing. After all, plenty of applications are best placed on a mainframe rather than trying to convert everything to run in the cloud. We’ve rehearsed the arguments for and against cloud in these blogs before, highlighting what works best in the cloud and what doesn’t.

Kyndryl surveyed 500 business and IT leaders and found that 86% of respondents are adopting AI and generative AI to accelerate their mainframe modernization initiatives. In addition, a third of respondents said that mainframes have become a foundation for running AI-enabled workloads. Lastly, almost half the people surveyed aim to use generative AI to unlock and transform critical mainframe data into actionable insights.

The survey also found that IT modernization projects and patterns are resulting in substantial business results, including triple-digit one-year return on investment (ROI) of 114% to 225%, and collective savings of $11.9 billion annually. Not surprisingly, most organizations have chosen a hybrid IT strategy.

According to the survey, 86% of respondents think that mainframes remain essential l (why not 100%?). In addition, the survey found that 96% of respondents are migrating a portion (on average that portion is 36%) of their applications to the cloud.

The survey found that organizations are running 56% of their critical workloads on a mainframe. Over half of the respondents said mainframe usage increased this year and 49% expect that trend to continue.

Other findings in the survey included the fact that many respondents are still facing a skills shortage, especially in new areas such as generative AI, which they hope will facilitate mainframe transformation and help alleviate the skills gap. Not surprisingly, security skills are in high demand because of increasing regulatory compliance requirements, with almost all respondents flagging security as the key factor driving modernization decisions. As a consequence, 77% of organizations in the survey are using external providers to deliver mainframe modernization projects.

Interestingly, respondents identified enterprise-wide observability as critical to effectively leveraging all data across their hybrid IT environment. In fact, 92% of respondents indicated that a single dashboard is important for monitoring their operations, but 85% stated they find it difficult to do this properly.

The survey was carried out by Coleman Parkes Research.

Sometimes I feel a bit like King Knut (Canute) sitting there trying to tell the tide to go back because I am forever telling people that the mainframe is the most modern computing platform currently available. It’s very difficult to modernize something that is already that modern! However, I, of course, recognize that other platforms have advantages in certain areas. I don’t carry a mainframe when I go to a business meeting, I use my very slim laptop. Likewise, cloud computing offers lots of benefits too. But I wouldn’t consider converting my mainframe applications (with all their spaghetti like integration with other applications) to run on a laptop, nor would I want to move them all to the cloud. It’s horses for courses, as they say.

Personally, I like the idea of artificial intelligence, when it can do lots of useful tasks that I may not want to do, and I am not surprised to see mainframe sites embracing its usage. I will be interested to see what the BMC 19^th Annual Mainframe Survey finds about the adoption of AI on mainframes when its results are published this week.