Las Vegas 2018

Mainframe: Love It or Leave It? (And How to do Either)

Digital transformation, especially for larger organizations, invariably involves the mainframe. For some organizations the mainframe remains an integral component of their corporate strategy and business operations.


For others, the mainframe is an aging resource they want to leave behind. Whatever the direction an organization takes with their mainframe, doing it right depends on more than just a vision or business imperative.


This panel of practitioners and analysts will share their experiences on:

- Best places to start a DevOps journey with a mainframe.

- Common errors to avoid. Culture—how to change it, how to get buy-in.

- What to keep on the mainframe (and how).

- What to move off the mainframe (and how).

- Impact on the toolchain for either choice.


Chris is the founder of FlowStates, a veteran-owned Enterprise DevOps consulting and implementation firm. He was most recently the Chief Transformation Officer at Kingsmen Software, crafting holistic DevOps solutions for clients of all sizes. Before Kingsmen, Chris spent 20 years in banking as Head of DevOps Services at 2 of the top 4 banks in the US (Wells Fargo and Bank of America).


Torsten has over 15 years of enterprise IT experience, including a two-and-a-half-year stint leading ASG Technologies' cloud business unit, Torsten returns to EMA to help end users and vendors leverage the opportunities presented by today's hybrid cloud and software-defined infrastructure environments in combination with advanced machine learning.


Anders Wallgren is Chief Technology Officer of Electric Cloud. Anders brings with him over 25 years of in-depth experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, Anders held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse. Anders also held management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award winning technologies such as Macromedia’s Director 7 and various Shockwave products. Anders holds a B.SC from MIT.

CN

Chris Nowak

Founder, FlowStates

TV

Torsten Volk

Managing Research Director, Hybrid Cloud, Software Defined Infrastructure and Machine Learning, EMA Research

RR

Rosalind Radcliffe

Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for DevOps for Enterprise Systems, IBM

AW

Anders Wallgren

CTO, Electric Cloud

Transcript

00:00:04

Hi, I'm Tim Johnson. I'm product marketing director at Electric Cloud. And thank you very much for being here. Um, I put this panel together, uh, to talk about mainframes. Uh, quick question here, how many people are love their mainframe? And that's what they're, that's what they're going forward with and they want to do more DevOps DevOpsy stuff with their mainframe. Okay. How many people are actively trying to get off their mainframe? Oh, okay. That, I'm a little surprised. I was expecting that to be nobody. So, okay, we're gonna change our questions up here a little bit. Um, introducing our panel, Anders Walgreens, CTO for Electric Cloud, Rosalyn Radcliffe. She is, uh, distinguished engineer and chief architect for DevOps. For IBM, we have Chris Noack, who is a, uh, consulting, uh, with Q2 strategies. He's currently on assignment at bank in New York, and we have Torson Vol here who is an industry analyst from EMA. So, um, first question, we're gonna throw it down here to, uh, to Anders.

00:01:07

Oh, sure.

00:01:08

Uh, so for, for trying to get off your mainframe, what's, uh, what's some dumb things to not do?

00:01:18

Well, don't, don't get off it unless you need to. Okay. I mean, is it, is there a problem that you're solving by, by getting off of it? Right. I mean, if it's processing 50,000 transactions a second for you and you don't have a replacement for that, then you probably shouldn't get rid of it. Okay. Um, on the other hand, if it's, you know, being replaced and you're not utilizing it and it's just an expensive asset at this point and you don't want to pay to upgrade it or get the new tooling or train the people, or your, your, your people are retiring and you can't replace them or, or any of those are the problems, then you may have a reason to replace it. But I would say number one, don't replace it. Just 'cause it's old technology. I mean it if it works using it. <laugh>.

00:01:58

Yeah. Rosalyn said Rosalyn wants to grab

00:02:00

The mic for you. I'll pass the mic over now. <laugh>,

00:02:03

It's

00:02:03

Not old, okay. It's the most modern ship we have. Okay. So there are reasons perceived, perceived, perceived old, I apologize. There are reasons. So for example, if you're still running your email system on the mainframe, you probably don't need to do that. There are probably other solutions, but if your business critical system is running there, there's no reason for it not to run there. It provides the transaction performance, it provides the scalability. And if you use a modern DevOps pipeline, then there's no problem with getting people. So stay put <laugh>, unless it doesn't make sense. And I will put that caveat, like email systems or something that's no business value, that's not your critical workload. That's not your, that you don't really need it for that, it's not serving the purpose then. Okay. But if it's serving a purpose, use it for its purpose.

00:02:57

Okay.

00:02:57

Should we ask why those three guys

00:02:58

Are moving away? Yeah, I was just gonna do that. So you, you raised your hand about why you're moving away. Can you give us some ideas on why?

00:03:05

Certainly, um, couple things. I think, so if you say critical system, so of all the systems that are on the main today, there's only one or two that are that critical and everything else is there. 'cause it's sort of accumulated around the center of the big things. And they tend to have local copies of data be in efficiently architected, be monolithic, right? And if I start to peel those things away and do functional things in microservices, it's easier to peel them away somewhere else. And it's to, that's where the talent is microservices and not have other systems that are out there. So I think I'm moving towards a point where maybe that one big thing is all that's left and I just connect the plumbing to it. I think another thing is licensing and cost, right? So our structure around how we pay for it is 20 years old, who knows? Right? So, um, total cost ownership maybe isn't in the best spot right now and I can't control it. Okay. So I'm moving off as much as I can, as fast as I can.

00:04:03

Okay. Who else raised your hand was you or? Yeah. Okay, so why, why are you moving off?

00:04:09

Very similar. I don't know if we're fully moving off, but trying to get workload off does not make sense anymore.

00:04:16

Okay. So you're moving some workloads off.

00:04:18

Some more critical systems are being rewritten. So are we gonna rewrite them on the mainframe?

00:04:26

Okay, so you're rewriting that. So I think, Chris, you want to jump in here?

00:04:29

I was gonna ask, and I think you started to answer it, is it really, you're getting off it all the way, or you're saying we're going to do the right things where they need to be and where it's still mission critical. It's, it's not off the table as an option.

00:04:42

Yeah, that's correct. I mean, so, so here, so the, the, I did some assessment, so we talked about this DevOps and like CACD, like point change. I would say the rate of change of the systems that live on the mainframe right now is slow. And for systems that change rapidly and certainly that are leveraging the ci cd and the DevOps pipeline, stuff like that, they're not on the mainframe. They're actually, the points where they integrate with the mainframe are kind of pain points. We're trying to, I mean, so I would say, but yes, I don't think there, there's not a, there's not a statement to say I want a zero Z os footprint by 2021 or something.

00:05:21

Okay. So you, you mentioned something that, that I think Rosalyn probably wants to jump in on here is the pace of change is much slower on the IBM and certainly we had one of our, I'm not

00:05:32

Just saying, I'm not saying that's because we're constraint. I'm saying just because those systems aren't changing much,

00:05:38

Right? Okay. It might be talent, it

00:05:40

Might be part of the attitude people that support them, it might be the way that they're sort of monolithic and siloed. And when I'm doing cross-functional things and building new things, cross that, I'm thinking different platforms, right? So I don't know how much effort I wanna invest in saying, well think modern, the thick mainframe at the same time, right? If we're already sort of moving in that direction. So

00:05:56

I mean, okay, so they,

00:05:59

I think there are, there are a couple of pieces in that that I wanna kind of pull out. And the first thing is that the mainframe is more than ZOS. So first off, the mainframe runs Linux on Z, it also runs block the secure service container. So if you actually wanna do docker in a secure service container that's running on the Z hardware, if you want to run blockchain that's running on the Z hardware. So the z the mainframe does a whole bunch of different things when you talk about ZOS, it also runs modern languages and modern processes. And so you need really thinking about a Java application that you might deploy somewhere. Maybe the data's there, so maybe you do wanna run that Java application on Z. So it's really all about what are you writing, how are you writing it, and where do you need it to run and what are the qualities of service you need for that thing if you need it close to the data, high reliability, transaction throughput kinds of things, putting it on Z makes a lot of sense. If you need it running in every little part of the world because you need the data in every little part of the world, then maybe you're not gonna run it on. So you need to think about that workload and, and not think about Z as it's COBOL or PL one. It's any modern language. It just happens to be more secure and more reliable and more stable and more and all of the goods and

00:07:27

More and more and more. I think, I think we picked up on that theme there Too heavy to steal too <laugh>. That's right.

00:07:33

Hey, wait, wait a second. If you've seen the latest one, it's a 19 inch rack, it looks just like the, the small baby Z looks just like any other 19 inch rack.

00:07:44

Okay. Steal now. Just kidding. Security piece. So, so the, uh, the, the other thing I wanted to pick up on is you mentioned that things move slowly and one of our other customers, um, said yeah, we have mainframe and you know, we do one a month and yes, we can do that deployment for you in October next year, but the, does it have to be that way? And okay, Rosalyn yes. If you have the right tool chain, I'm gonna give it hundreds a shot at this one.

00:08:13

Yeah, actually I'm gonna ask this question. So of, of those of you that are using mainframes, how many are using modern languages on the mainframe no matter what OS and so on? Or is it all cobal? PL one in the room?

00:08:28

Oh, there's one back there. So they're modern. They're modern, yeah.

00:08:30

Okay. How many here just found out for the first time that you could actually run modern languages in tooling on the mainframe and didn't already know this so you've just decided it's not worth it or for some other reason then? I mean, I mean there are people out there that, that it's just another node. It's just another, I gotta push some bits over here, I gotta push some bits over here. I gotta send a message there, send a message. I mean, from our perspective, you know, in electric flow, not to talk product, but we don't care. Like, I don't care, as long as you gimme an IP address and some credentials and a command to send somewhere and a port number, we don't care. Why should anybody else care? You know? And, and I, so I think it really is all about the tooling and we have a similar thing with our other product, which is Electric Accelerator, which is a make file based product.

00:09:15

It's parallel distributed make. And people come to us all the time and say, people still use make, I'm like, yeah, things that have been around for 40 years are generally pretty fucking useful, right? <laugh>, they're the things that are not useful, they tend to go away after a year or two, like bad restaurants and, and and so on. So I, so I always find it kind of amusing that it's, you know, it's really about can, if I can treat it as just another thing that I deploy to from the, from the orchestration and automation perspective that, you know, that's the hat I wear, then I don't care. You know? And, and neither really should anybody else Now licensing costs and training and, and, and quite frankly, I mean, you know, yes there are, you know, modern languages and those kinds of things, but getting a, and I'm gonna be grossly generalistic here, but getting a millennial to go sit down and write software for, for a, for a a mainframe is, you're gonna have to tie him down a little bit and convince 'em that it's fun, you know? Um, we'll, we'll come back to that one. Yeah, I think REO wants to jump in here for a moment.

00:10:10

Yeah, I mean, what we are seeing and tell me, uh, if, if that's the case for you too, but it's, it's about the consolidation of the, the staff, right? And of the tooling. So, uh, if you look at hyperconverged infrastructure, which has, I don't know, 20, 25%, uh, uh, market share, and then you have your server platforms, uh, you want to probably reduce, uh, the tooling that you also then use and the expertise that you need and the support for the mainframe, right? And, uh, that's, that's what we are seeing. And when you look at the show flow, it's actually quite interesting. They have very nice new IDE for a mainframe where you can debug in real time and you see dependency mapping variables. Everything looks super cool and you can turn them into ma into, um, into microservices, right? Where you can get a restful API in front of it. But I, I, I need to, I need to really ask, I don't have that knowledge. Can the same administrators then, uh, the same developers and the same administrators who would run, uh, uh, no Gs or any of those tools, uh, can they run them on the mainframe as well as they can run them on distributed? Or do you need a separate group of people to do that?

00:11:12

So most of the tools and such can use the same people, same tool. So if it's node, it's node, it's the same tools. If it's, so those are the same kinds of things. If it's Linux, then it's Linux is, Linux is Linux and it doesn't matter for ZOS, you still need some number of ZOS system programmers. Today though, most of the data can be fed through common data provider to Splunk to, so take your choice. You can use modern tools as well. In the end, you'll need a few system programmers, but I can be, based on what I've seen in the world, the number of system programmers required for a mainframe that does billions of transactions is significantly lower than the number of system programmers you probably have to maintain your Windows or docker or anything else. So the, you need very few. You still need a few. We haven't gotten all of the tools down to zero as in different, but most of the tools are the same. Most of the skills are the same that you need in this environment. So it's, it's not that different. There are some kicks, system programmer, IMS, some of those, but mostly it's very few.

00:12:25

Okay. Um, so the, uh, I used to work at a company that you may have heard of that does search. I won't name them, but my first experience, not, not Yahoo. My first experience there was I walked around, I walked in and I looked around and I thought, can a shoe polish? Anybody, anybody ever walk on a raised floor? And I have a question. Yes.

00:12:49

Okay. Uh, I, I worked in the financial markets for more than 20 years and I saw many, many guys, uh, breaking the face, trying to downsize from the mainframe, the core systems. Uh, but looking for develops and looking for the future, uh, I have some doubts like, uh, the cost of the, the license, et cetera. And, uh, if you have, uh, some experience to create some, uh, more environments like development, qa, uh, put the shift to left practice of pilot and uh, how do you can make a, a blue green deployment to, to, to reduce the downtime in the deployment. This is my, my big doctor about mainframe and develop. I don't know if it, it's clear.

00:13:45

Okay. Alright. So,

00:13:46

So let me, let me start with the last,

00:13:48

Lemme lemme repeat what I think the question is so that everybody could hear. Um, the, so you've seen a lot of people try and fail at getting off the mainframe and that one thing that, uh, a component that would be critical for you is bluegreen deployment capabilities. Is that, that, okay. Green deployment

00:14:07

Capabilities and the shift to left the process from QA and,

00:14:11

And the, and user

00:14:12

Acceptance.

00:14:13

Okay. And using and shifting everything left as much as you can. Right. Okay. Alright. So, so

00:14:18

The couple of things. One, the mainframe has been designed for, I don't know how many years to be 100% available. So VisaNet has been up for, oh, I don't know how many years, but it's more than 12 and it's never been down. So there's nothing about Z that says you have to come down to do an update. Uh, you can roll the system, you can keep everything up and running. So that's not an issue. It might be an application problem. It's probably more likely a deployment problem or a historical problem. We always IPL on X date, so we're gonna do it. There's no reason for any of that. You can stay up first. Second, the Z is just another environment. You can create baby Z environments just as easily as I can create other systems. In fact, you can run ZOS in Intel Linux. We have technology that allows you to do that.

00:15:11

So you can cloud provision a ZOS system. And so you can do your unit testing, you can do each level. You could also use ZVM, uh, the VM that existed first virtual machine, the thing we have, you could use ZVM and provision them on Z hardware or you can even do 'em in existing lpar. So there are multiple ways to do that. And actually I did a does talk in 2015 that is recorded that you can go out and see all about the automated testing and shift left and the fact that you can do it. So there are all sorts of answers. There's nothing about the way distributed development works today, shift left. None of those practices don't apply to ZOS and they can work just as well with cobol as with anything else.

00:15:57

I, and I, I, I think for me it's, it's kind of similar to when I hear people talk about, you know, we do firmware, so we can't do DevOps, you know, our stuff gets burned into a chip and we can't possibly do DevOps. Well that's BS too, right? I mean it's, it's the same thing. You emulate, you simulate, you know, all of those kinds of things. There's always a way to to, to do it. And it's a little bit of a cop out to say, well, you know, because we're XY and we're, we're the duck bill platypus, we can't possibly automate or we can't orchestrate, or we can't do unit testing, or we can't do these kinds of things. I think it's, there's always a way, um, you know, is it technically feasible? Is it financially feasible? Is it, you know, temporally feasible, all of those things. Those are different, you know, discussions obviously, but it, there's no, you know, there's no laws of physics that says it can't be done. So,

00:16:43

And I, and I'll amplify that, um, I did this in banks for about 20 years of, well, the DevOps pieces for maybe 10 years. And it's always that we're like, well, we can't do this. My application's special. I go, I know your application's special, let's take a look at it. And at the end of the day, you know, I'd always say, it doesn't matter to me, it's just another IP address. And, and you can do all of those things that you need to do if you just recognize that now the one thing you do need is a deterministic process because if it's all over the place, you can't automate something that's random. So if you have the process and it's deterministic and you have a target IP and a port and those things that you need from a networking perspective, it can be done.

00:17:21

Okay. So, alright, good. Um, so I wanna get back to the point of going towards is that, you know, you, you mentioned millennials and, and so forth, and I tell my kids about, yeah, actually sat and typed COBAL code on a card reader and they like that, that's when dirt was young dad, you know, <laugh>. So how do you get people interested in being on being mainframe and, and things like that? Is, is that a challenge that you folks have that trying to get people interested that no, this, this thing actually does work and it's valuable and it's cool and things like that? So I,

00:17:57

I have question before.

00:18:00

Okay.

00:18:02

So, uh, main thing, we know that process amount of data, but we always think it on not as, so we need to talk about the way that we are set up right now. Right now, I didn't see you mentioning talking about containers and, uh, micro, when we talk about that in the distributor world, we have containers in a, in in an environment where these containers monitor, they are, we have looked at how we have caught automatically on a load basis, make sure it possible,

00:19:07

Okay, so the question is, do you know, can you spin up containers, microservices, all that current magic that everybody's really excited about, can you do that on the mainframe? Is is that the short question? Okay, so

00:19:19

The two hals to that two answers. One, if you're really using containers, Linux on Z runs just fine and works in fact scales up better depending on the workload you want to do. It can scale up instead of scale out. And so you can do larger processing and there's a YouTube video about processing data in a way on a scale up system. So you can do that. It's all there, it's all available. If we're talking about ZOS, it's been, it it is built for being able to do lots of transactions at once on the system in a reliable manner. So it's been doing billions of transactions on a regular basis. So yes, it's built for that. Yes, it can do that. The problem is, let's step back to development. People say Z can't do parallel development. Yeah, great. That's because we've been on old library managers that are built based on a structure of waterfall development that assume that. So how about let's use modern tools. So use git, use git branches, have your own isolated environment and do development exactly the same way you do everywhere else. And then parallel development's just fine. So there's no issue there. So all of the barriers that are in your way or thought about Z is are old processes. They're old thoughts, they're, you know, it's, it's been this way forever. You're right, except the Z has moved on. So let's move our practices on.

00:20:52

Okay, so that's, I think you mentioned something about you got hide bound old guys doing it the old way. And what we've heard from questions and so forth is a, it sounds more like an education issue here than anything else. It's a, it's and, and a cultural issue when you're talking to, you know, millennials and you say, cobol, you know, what is that? You know, my granddad wrote COBOL and things like, so how do we overcome that? That's, is there sonar cube plugin for cobol? Is there a sonar cube plugin for co ball? Yes. Okay. Yes.

00:21:23

I mean, seriously. Yes.

00:21:27

Well, I'm gonna ask the question, right? So forget about mainframe for a minute. As you've all gone through DevOps journeys, and I'm assuming that you're more than day zero on these things, you're here, haven't you resolved these problems already? You're like, well, if there's this technology, this it's job, it's dotnet, it's whatever. You've done these things, you've said, all right, let's collapse these things to common processes and common tools where it makes sense. Why is the mainframe any different? It's, and you know why? And go ahead. It's right. Culture and

00:21:51

People. Yeah. So it's culture and people, the, the people that have been there have been doing it for a long time. But when you're talking about getting kids on the platform, how about when they come in and they're new kids and they're working, you don't start with a sentence that Z's going away, so this job's gonna go away, or how about you don't start with that part doesn't matter, or we're gonna do the fun stuff over here. How about the sentence that, and one company uses this, uh, the work that you're gonna do on this system runs the world. You're running the major banking system, you are running the credit card system, you are processing all the transactions for, or you're running the airline. All of those are true statements. So instead of doing the negative about what they're working on, do the positive about what they're working on. It's real value, it's running the businesses. Explain that. And then kids don't, well, kids might have a problem with ISPF, okay, but kids don't have a problem with building stuff for Z. They have a problem with old tools and practices.

00:22:59

Okay. Torsten, you wanna jump in on that?

00:23:04

Yeah, I mean it's a, it's, i, from what we see in our research, uh, it's really all about integration, which costs money, right? And education that also costs money and tooling that, uh, again, costs money. And, um, it's a consolidation thing where we, we, we have a, we have a lot of data that basically shows that, uh, and hopefully you guys can confirm that too, that, um, uh, from a multi-cloud management perspective, from a data center management perspective, uh, it's all about squeezing cost out of, uh, out of the, uh, the opex, right? Getting the opex as low as as possible. And, uh, adding another technology by definition, um, is the feedback that we often get, uh, is, is not, uh, is not in the books. And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm so hesitant, which I usually am not for, for people who know me, but, uh, it's, it's not, uh, it shouldn't really be a cultural problem because it, the four nines we were talking about, that's the mainframe of four nines on site, or six, i, i, I don't know, but you know how many five nines, okay, and I, I need, I know you need in distributed infrastructure, right?

00:24:11

You need to build a hell of a lot of a, uh, of, of, of, of a system that's also not that easy to build over multiple sites to get the same number of nines, right? So, uh, that's what I'm saying, you know, as an industry analyst there, there's a couple of things that I, I don't fully, uh, always grasp from a, from a Orion, from a tech perspective because it looks like a good proposition, but it may just, you know, IBM may not be spending enough money on the marketing. I don't know.

00:24:37

Can I just, okay, we got Paul here from Compuware. Yeah,

00:24:41

No, I just wanted to share, I think a, a, a beacon to all this. A lot of the companies speaking this week here, and I think of like American Express a and aro voids, Lincoln Financial, they all saw these as as opportunities. They were mainframe companies. They've incorporated their DevOps initiatives and brought the mainframe into that. So we're seeing great things happen. So I would suggest for those of you that are just looking for, you know, how can you do it? You know, you look to leaders like, like American Express, Andrew Lloyds, uh, Lincoln Financial because they're doing it and it's, it's been pretty cool to see, uh, in, in the mainframe space.

00:25:18

Okay. So we got four minutes left. Um, I want to ask a question here and maybe incorporate, you know, what's, what's preventing you from being more successful with, with your mainframes right now?

00:25:30

The comment real quick I wanted to make is I work with a RP, our core business runs on mainframe. There are lots of design factors you can use to actually modernize, for lack of a better word, that as a strategy works much better than, you know, talking about reengineering model system from scratch, the vertical more discussion. I think that's the point that gentleman was making in the fact it was less about the tools, but more about how can I databases that and just to add to that, right, the same company, right main, the mainframe for a lot of processing, but it's so much easier for us to implement dev box or middleware because of the tools, because people that's doing it, we can do additional research. We feel like if we do it on the mainframe, besides feel like we, we've the pioneers, right? Not not having a lot of help in the forefront, uh, just, just as implemented cws example so we can follow them from our jamma codes. You felt like we, the first problem,

00:26:47

I, I think one of the problems is in the mainframe space, people are quieter about what they do. And so I'll say you're not one of the first people are just quiet and we need more of the mainframe customers to stand up and explain externally what they're doing.

00:27:03

So the call for papers for DevOps enterprise Summit 2019 is going out very, very shortly. So, uh, we got one quick, one more back in the back there. I think

00:27:13

The, but the trend is you are not embracing change. You are moving with the technology. If you have make expert, we're migrating from Now the problem is we have these systems that are built nineties, the structure is different, right. Solutions so gets rather than solving the problem. Yeah, exactly. That's the problem. And I think I not, they need to do a better job in articulating that distributed issues only can screw up most of the time is your application.

00:28:07

Okay, thank you. I

00:28:09

Just, but I won't say that in.

00:28:12

Okay. Alright, one more here. Oh yes. This

00:28:18

Is a five year journey and four years. Most of the vendors talked about distributors. That was easy place to all the products conversation. What you do say D two running away, this is new. This opportunity for mainframe to be treated in the same way is a new conversation. And it's because mainframe is so the opportunity. So I think it's anything other than people now starting see there value, we can sell you product and you can start to move space.

00:29:03

Okay, great. Thank you. Um, Andres, you wanna close it out?

00:29:07

Yeah, I just, I, one, one thing I was gonna say is sort of, you know, there is an old saying, you know, those who don't understand Unix are doomed to re-implement it again and again poorly, right? There's a lot of lessons to be learned from mainframe architecture and I think it's a good observation that I bet you people who have problems moving their apps off of mainframes would have the same problem moving that same app out of, you know, you know, WebSphere running on Linux because it's a monolith and probably maybe not architected, right? To be able to put it into microservices and all of those kinds of things. And so, you know, you are throwing out the baby with the bath water a little bit if you, you know, kind of tar the mainframe with the monolith brush if you will. Right? And I, and I think you have to understand that, and I think, you know, there's a lot of rude awakenings that, that are gonna happen for everybody that, that thinks they can just lift and shift everything into cloud without being a little bit cloud native, right?

00:29:59

That that doesn't work either. It does not compute. Um, and then one last thing I wanted to say is I think there is a little bit of education missing here, right? I think one of the things that, that I lacked in my education many years ago is this notion of, look, you're gonna walk into a lot of situation where there's history, there's culture, there's technology, not all of it can be replaced. Most of it shouldn't be replaced. And you have to work in those constraints. And, and, and that's, you know, that's something that people have to understand from an engineering perspective, right? Good and bad. Uh, and, and I think there's a lot of just sort of, oh, well let's just rewrite it in the coolest new thing, whatever that is. And I think there has to be a little bit of perspective on the trade offs of all of those things. And I think education is part of it. And if, if we're not educating our, you know, our, our computer scientists these days to understand that there's this hardware and there's that hardware and there's this type of thing and that type of thing, I, you know, I think we're, we're we're doing them a disservice, uh, for for sure. It also

00:30:53

Didn't make workloads mobile.

00:30:54

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean there's, there's so many, you know, service oriented architectures and you know, there's a bazillion different things that we've tried where, you know, we end up blaming the technology when really it was probably mostly application architectures that are to blame for the problems, honestly.

00:31:10

And to step away from technology. Think about it from the business perspective, right? What problem are you really trying to solve? Do you need, you know, subsecond or millisecond transaction times? I mean, how cool would it be to detect fraud in real time? That's interesting. What about social media? How do you, you know, get ahead of your competition because your mobile is connected directly to the mainframe through an API. That's kind of cool, right? Print up those big iron t-shirts and pass 'em out. This

00:31:34

This, this is another tool in the toolbox.

00:31:39

Go ahead. Any, any other comments? Okay, so I, I think a couple of takeaways Next year, this is gonna be a town hall so you guys can ask more questions. Two, I think we're gonna put together some kind of secret society pin or something that, hey, I'm a mainframer, you know, and not secret <laugh> public society, right? Everybody needs to see where

00:32:04

Right. Everybody who has a 15 pound laptop as a mainframe

00:32:07

<laugh>. That's true. That's true. Well, laptop can be a mainframe. Yes. You right. So I, I've had fun. Has this been valuable for you folks? Okay. Alright, thank you very much. It's break time. Enjoy.