In many organisations, the mainframe’s potential is no longer being realised, and skills retirement is making it more difficult to understand and upgrade this valuable asset. There is a fear about touching the sensitive machinery because nobody understands the impact it will have.

“How will it affect your business if an application stops running for an hour or a day?” asks Guido Falkenberg, senior vice-president, Mainframe Modernisation at Software AG. “What kind of financial and reputational damage will it cause? Being a back-end system, you might not realise the cost of losing your mainframe’s functionality until it’s gone. You need to prevent this disaster by injecting new technologies into the mainframe and updating and integrating this platform. If you wait and do nothing, the risks will not go away, and the value will also not be leveraged in areas where you need it.”