October 23, 2020

by Todd Erickson

Modernizing your IBM mainframe instead of migrating off the platform leads to higher customer and company satisfaction says and IDC study of 440 organizations in Australia, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Commissioned by Rocket Software, a legacy infrastructure consulting firm, the study as reported by IT Jungle found that IBM shops that modernized their IBM mainframe infrastructure instead of migrating to more modern platforms were more satisfied across a number of metrics before and after the projects.

The shops that modernized reported higher satisfaction than the shops than migrated across the following 7 metrics:

(1) customer experience;
(2) overall performance;
(3) security, availability, and disaster recovery capabilities;
(4) agility, microservices, and DevOps;
(5) ease of finding talent;
(6) ability to incorporate AI and IoT;
(7) and API, mobile, and Web enablement.

According to the study report, in addition to seeing higher satisfaction ratings, the organizations that modernized generally reported paying less on hardware, software, and staffing.

The study seems to dispel the common IT industry myth that mainframe platforms are less capable than more modern systems simply because of their age.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at terickson@phasechange.ai.