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Proving technical feasibility of a mainframe migration solution is no mean feat. In this blog we will analyse how we work hand-in-hand with our customers to assure them that decades old, highly..

When it comes to the mainframe, understanding an environment can sometimes be one of the biggest challenges a company faces. This blog will examine why discovery is an essential first step on a..

Those of us that work in IT sometimes forget that the word “legacy” wasn’t always associated with computers. What is the mainstream definition? A simple Google search can help.

In areas except..

Tipping point:noun [ S or U]/ˈtɪp.ɪŋ ˌpɔɪnt/

The time at which a change or an effect cannot be stopped

Most IT leaders understand they must migrate away from legacy technologies before they reach a..

Many organizations use tooling to facilitate faster development and maintenance of their legacy applications. One example is Delta ADS for COBOL and PL/I, tooling which helps companies maintain..

Companies seeking to migrate away from any legacy platform are faced with challenges in two key areas:

1. Application and artefact knowledge – what do their applications do, is source code available,..

“Big problems are best solved in small pieces”  - Frank Sonnenberg

We are working with a finance sector client which is looking to offload some of its production MIPS to the more cost effective..

“The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book”  - Northrop Frye

If more people still owned the book that documents the configuration of their mainframe..

Multiple US state government departments were in the news last week, calling for COBOL programmers to come forward as their mainframe systems failed to handle a surge in unemployment claims..

At LzLabs, we work relentlessly on improving test facilities to deploy new versions of our own product rapidly. We believe our customers can achieve significant agility benefits if they are able to..

John Henry Newman was an English theologian in the 1800’s – first an Anglican priest and eventually a Catholic Cardinal. As an educator and an author, Cardinal Newman has said and done some quite..

Like many companies, recent events have made us pivot our focus away from "business as usual" and towards how we support our employees and their families, and how we help our customers during a..

In a previous blog, I talked about the initial steps necessary for any successful modernization project. The process of discovering, or perhaps re-discovering all the technological component and..

Much of the focus of IT modernization presumes an organization has an existing install base of computing infrastructure and applications and wants to move them forward in some meaningful way...

Much of the discussion I’ve seen about the mainframe is a debate about whether it’s a great platform and people should stay, or they are about all the challenges organizations face with this..

As we discussed in our previous blog about application development challenges on the mainframe, our survey shows that testing mainframe applications is also an issue. The processes involved in..

In our last blog about our 2019 Mainframe Modernization Survey, we talked about the advantages respondents report when migrating applications off the mainframe. Over half (52%) report increased..

The lack of agility and innovation in their mainframe environment is driving many to consider alternatives, including cloud deployment models. It is believed that there are advantages to moving off..

If an organization can’t innovate how can it expect to compete?

Our belief is that organizations should modernize their application portfolios to enable innovation. And what exactly do we mean by..

LzLabs recently sponsored a survey of 650 of the world's largest organizations. The selected organizations have significant applications still running on mainframes. In this survey 94% of the..

How long will it take for organizations to act on a problem they KNOW they have

The mainframe skills challenge is looming. Everyone knows it! Survey after survey shows a recognition that this is a..

The challenge of managing mainframe applications continues, unabated by the passage of time. While organizations see the merits of bringing core applications into the modern era, few of them have..

In all the years I have been involved in the mainframe market, as a developer, systems programmer and Gartner analyst, it’s been quite surprising in the last decade to see organizations believe that..

In a recent Avanade blog post entitled "The 'C' in CX really stands for change", Ken Ramoutar discussed how the greatest challenges in enhancing the customer experience is the change it brings to a..

According to a Google search, one of the definitions of "legacy" is "denoting or relating to software or hardware that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use."

We..

When implementing the LzLabs Software-Defined Mainframe® - a container-based re-hosting technology which enables organizations’ mainframe applications to run, unchanged on x86 and the cloud – our..

What characteristics or steps determine the difference between a successful or failed mainframe migration? Having followed mainframe migration projects for 18 years (and over 10,000 inquiries) at..

A common question when rehosting mainframe batch workload to a Linux O/S, whether in the cloud or on-premise, is "how do I achieve scalability to respond to business needs?" This blog is designed to..

Google has been one of the leading pioneers of software containers. In 2006, two of its engineers, Paul Manage and Rohit Seith, defined and implemented an essential component of this new container..

Recently, I heard: "DevOps was created to fix the issue caused by Agile". Even though, "issue" is probably not the right word, it is true that DevOps was born from the requirement for faster rollout..

COBOL and Java represent two different eras of computing history: COBOL was invented in the early sixties by a team led by Grace Hopper (now considered as the mother of modern programming) based on..

In 2011, Marc Andreessen, father of the seminal and legendary Mosaic internet browser and co-founder of Netscape, wrote in the Wall Street Journal a very famous article "Why software is eating the..

Recently, one of our key clients, Swisscom turned off their mainframe! They migrated their ENTIRE mainframe application portfolio to the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe (SDM). In fact, as far as I..

In psychology and behavioral economics there is the notion of an "endowment effect". This notion suggests that people attribute MORE value to something they already have than something new.

Many..

There is a story in Greek mythology about creatures, called Sirens, whose song caused sailors to crash their ships on the rocky shores. Like the Greek sailors of old, business leaders have been..

Modernization of legacy applications is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach: LzLabs Software-Defined Mainframe® offers a wide palette of solutions for a business application, usually both critical..

Markus Tschumper, Head of General IT Services at Swisscom, and I met on stage at Garter Symposium/ITXpo 2018 to discuss Swisscom’s migration to the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe®(SDM). Covering..

As Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018 drew to a close, attendees left Barcelona with a clearer understanding of the benefits that surround embracing open-source solutions. In addition to this, and possibly..

If day one at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo was about making introductions and reacquaintances, day two was about taking a deeper dive into digital transformation. At the LzLabs booth, visitors had the..

With over 6,000 attendees flooding through the doors at this year’s Barcelona Gartner Symposium, day one was always going to be busy on the LzLabs booth with attendees from around the world..

Over 6,000 senior IT executives and CIOs are expected to attend this year’s Gartner Symposium which takes place between 4th-8th November at the CCIB conference centre in Barcelona. For the second..

In conjunction with Microsoft we recently commissioned Vanson Bourne, a well-respected survey organization, to talk to 500 senior IT executives across almost that many companies using mainframe..

At LzLabs, what we call the Power of Open is at the core of everything we do. It’s about allowing customers to move from legacy proprietary environments, to ones in which they can leverage the..

For decades we’ve heard about the superiority of the mainframe legacy platform for high performance and reliability. But today’s problems aren’t about the platform, they are about the applications..

The changing demographics in the IT industry are clear. This existential paradox is driven by the belief that the demands of a modern IT workforce are dramatically different than those of the “Baby..

In February 2018 the computing world celebrated the 20^th anniversary of “open-source”. Or rather, it celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the definition of open-source being formally set down by the..

SpaceX revolutionized spacecraft architecture with the launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket on 6th February for the number of engines its triple-core booster used to reach orbit. Each of the craft’s..

The world of banking has been dominated by mainframe infrastructure for decades. However, one would be hard-pressed to find any bank or financial institution that has been created in the last 10-15..

The current leading edge form of cloud computing is serverless. Wikipedia says that “serverless computing” is “a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the..

It is claimed that we have Compaq to thank for first coining the term ‘cloud computing’ in 1996. Perhaps if Compaq had slapped a copyright on the concept and followed through with conviction that..

Batch processing, long an architectural approach of many legacy mainframe environments continues to operate even today in a modern world of web and mobile computing. This type of workload is..

The LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® (SDM) enables legacy applications to execute in a binary-compatible form, in an x86 Linux OS environment or in the cloud, by providing two key components:

1.  The..

Just over a year since our launch at CeBIT 2016, L^zLabs has gone from strength to strength, topping off 12 months of successes by recently announcing a landmark move by Switzerlands largest telcos..

In a recent post by Robert Cringely, “The Cloud Computing Tidal Wave” (http://www.cringely.com/2017/05/04/cloud-computing-tidal-wave/ ) he suggested that cloud computing was going to have as big an..

Reaction to: ‘Docker Containers for Legacy Applications’ by Christine Hall, available here: http://windowsitpro.com/cloud/containerize-legacy-apps-docker-mta

What if someone could bring the REAL..

Big Iron, Light as a Cloud: Flexibility, Cost Savings, AND Innovation

Over the past few months, we’ve seen some global household names decide to adopt a “cloud-only” strategy: international brands..

Legacy Languages, Fewer Skilled Team Members, and Moore's Law

There are points in time when all things combine to ensure only one likely outcome. Those who can see it coming can prepare, and those..