In this era of application modernisation, people are also looking to modernise their mainframes. As more cloud providers (such as Amazon Web Services and Azure) set up shop in South Africa, there's greater opportunity for South African businesses to move their mainframes to the cloud. But is it that simple to move 'big iron' to the cloud?
Mainframes are traditionally monolithic entities that are kept behind locked doors and are approached only by the very few people in the company that are qualified to deal with them. And that's just one of the challenges faced, says Gary de Menezes, Country General Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa at Micro Focus.
This lack of skills is particularly evident at businesses with legacy systems and mainframes; they're traditionally very old, big, expensive and hard to maintain. "We're trying to break the boundaries around this so-called dinosaur," says De Menezes, "and bring it into the cloud. Previous attempts to modernise the mainframe have been cosmetic at best."
He's talking about a mainframe system that's cloud-based, with a user-friendly interface that's able to collaborate with all modern environments. He poses the question, "Is this still a legacy system?"
People tend to be intimidated by the mainframe, because there's such a lack of skills around it, businesses tend to leave it untouched. And this is perpetuating the problem, says De Menezes. "They need to be open to doing things differently with the mainframe or it will continue to sit in a black hole behind a vaulted door and only understood by the few."
Benefits to be had
The benefits of shifting your mainframe workload to the cloud are undeniable. They include being able to scale up and down as and when the business demands require it. The cost savings are clear. One of the biggest limitations of a mainframe, according to Paul Cripsey, Presales Director for South Africa at Micro Focus, is that it's a static environment. When you consider the sheer cost of setting up the various mainframe environments required to deliver various capabilities, such as running applications, quality testing, pre-production testing, load testing, etc, you can see how migrating some of these capabilities to the cloud could incur significant cost savings, says Cripsey.
"Financial institutions are among the biggest users of mainframes," he continues, "they traditionally have monolithic mainframe environments that run their mission-critical workloads and are therefore ideally positioned to benefit from migrating some of their legacy mainframe workloads to the cloud."
New age financial institutions are under huge pressure to reduce their cost of service delivery - and the biggest cost by far as a percentage of their budget is wrapped up in the data centre and the mainframe. New opportunities are being presented by cloud providers setting up infrastructure capabilities on the African continent. Businesses can pay for capacity when they want to carry out testing, or pay for increased capacity over peak periods like month end. With a traditional mainframe infrastructure, the business would have to pay for that additional capacity all the time. In the cloud, they can scale up and down as required, running at 25% less for most of the month and only surging out at peak periods.
De Menezes says, "We're enabling that for them and for other customers across all sectors. The ability to take this capability to an additional platform - i.e. the cloud - has sparked huge demand from customers globally. This is definitely a disruptive technological driver that's being forced on us by our customers."
Adapt or die
But this new approach to as-a-service offerings and usage models is posing a massive challenge for software vendors, he says. "Your traditional revenue streams are now compromised because we're talking about paying for what you consume, as you need it, instead of perpetual licences and annual support contracts, which are what most vendors reply on. The ability to adapt your business to meet these changing demands is going to be one of the key differentiators in the software world today."
He continues: "Partnerships with cloud providers such as AWS and Azure will become critical for software vendors in order to grow their businesses as this new business model is becoming the de facto standard that we're seeing in the market today."
Previously, a business would have a software licence for a particular environment. Today's businesses pay licence fees as they use the software, and as the load increases, they pay for that accordingly, nobody is tied into annual license fees any more, says Cripsey. "As much as businesses need to be more agile in terms of their research and development cycles, software vendors need to be equally agile in how they bill customers on a usage model."
Collaboration is key
Another trend highlighted by both Cripsey and De Menezes is that in order to support the quicker release of new versions, businesses can no longer afford to have siloed divisions, they have to integrate and cooperate in order to achieve agility. And that applies equally to the mainframe environment, which is now able to become part of the DevOps cycle.
De Menezes refers to the 'better together' mindset adopted when Micro Focus acquired HP Enterprise's software business. "It's all about breaking down silos across the various product ranges and making them work across the portfolios."
"This trend is driving acquisitions in the software vendor space. Businesses have to consider how long it would take them to develop a certain capability, compared to how quickly they can acquire a business that already has it."
This fast-changing world in the cloud is resulting in software vendors having to make acquisitions in order to stay relevant to customers.
Skills shortage
Another challenge being faced by businesses, adds Cripsey, is access to the necessary skills to manage this new breed of mainframe environment. To this end, Micro Focus is partnering Wits University to ensure that South African business has access to qualified, workplace-ready IT skills.
He says: "Graduates are no longer assured of a job once they complete their studies. Businesses no longer have the luxury of spending time to get someone up to speed and training them, which has left a gap between freshly qualified graduates and businesses that need their skills but can't afford to wait for them. We're trying to fill that gap by providing hands-on training for graduates so that they can go straight into a big organisation and be productive from day one."
The challenges of moving the mainframe to the cloud is very much a reality faced by businesses today - although South Africa is somewhat behind the curve. The challenge, says Cripsey, is to explore the opportunities, to engage and understand what opportunities there are, and employ the right people who are change-makers. "Old-fashioned people tend to stick with what they know and accordingly make decisions that cause mainframe to stay in that stagnant state. Businesses need change makers, people who will challenge the norm and the status quo and actively see how they can adopt what's happening in rest of world, how they can implement best practices to drive down the cost of delivery. The alternative is for businesses to just become another financial casualty."
The same principle applies to software vendors, says De Menezes. "We also need to stay relevant through the continuous acquisition of technology capabilities to meet customers' rapidly changing demands."
And the skills gap goes beyond simple access to IT skills, it's a more fundamental issue than that, he says. "What it also means is that younger people who are open to exploring new ways of doing things are just not found in the mainframe environment."
C-who's in charge?
As the lines between different areas of the business blur and silos fall away, it also becomes unclear who is responsible for what. De Menezes says, "We're definitely seeing a merging of three areas: the old mainframe operation, the DevOps environment (which is becoming more mature), and the security space." He refers to it was DevSecOps, saying, "More security is being brought into application development, not just around testing but at the coding level, which is being done on the mainframe. This causes unease amongst people who are accustomed to there being three separate worlds. By adding cloud to the mix we're really stretching people's ability to change. This is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses on this journey. Cloud in the mainframe space will disrupt everyone. But it's an unavoidable for any business looking to reduce costs."
In the face of this statement, considering who should drive the move is valid. Is it the CIO's role? Traditionally the CIO is charged with keeping lights on within budget. He - or she - is not a transformational change maker. But then which C-role does this fall to? If a business wants to transform costs, not just curtail them, if it really wants to take on the power that cloud provides. The answer, according to Cripsey, is the entire C-suite. "There's no role created thus far that caters for this. The days of the C-suite not being technologically aware are gone. This type of initiative is much bigger than the ambit of the CIO. We're changing the profile of the people needed to drive today's business for tomorrow."
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