That's the most realistic assessment I've seen.
On 6/18/2022 11:36 PM, David Crayford wrote:
It's not just about fixing broken code. If you read the ING CIO's
remarks about why they wanted off the mainframe it's not about the
platform. Nobody denies that mainframes are insanely brilliant hardware
platforms. ING wanted to get rid of batch and move towards an event
driven architecture using pub/sub where they can easily deploy loosely
coupled micro-services to provide cutting edge products. The technology
stacks are built on open source such as Kafka, MongoDB, Cassandra, NiFi,
Avro etc. The retail banking industry has been disrupted by fintechs so
waiting for an overnight batch schedule for settlements is a competitive
disadvantage. Cracking open and modernizing 50-60 year old COBOL batch
applications is a VERY heavy lift.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/01/ing_mainframe_strategy/ <- read
the comments section. It's hilarious :)
The doubly whammy is there's a skills crisis slowly unraveling. In the
last year we've had 3 key resources move to 3 day weeks with a view to
retiring. Replacing highly skilled assembler programmers with deep
subsystem knowledge is proving to be difficult. Young people don't want
to learn HLASM as they consider it a dead-end. Their position is "why
invest 3-4 years learning a language that is useless if you move to
another industry?" I can't comment about COBOL application developers.
In 10 years time I expect the mainframe to be alive and kicking and
significantly modernized. The small/medium shops will probably be all
gone. When I first moved to my current town in 1998 there were 25-30
mainframe sites. Now there are 3 and 1 is on life support. One of our
customers re-platformed their CICS/COBOL/Batch applications from a z9 to
a single blade server. It doesn't make any sense financially for a small
site to run a mainframe.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/wa-insurance-commission-decommissions-mainframe-322780
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