The Future of Mainframes: Are They Evolving or Becoming Obsolete?

For over 50 years, Mainframe has been a backbone of large organizations and has run mission-critical applications with transactional data at high volumes. Nevertheless, with the advent of cloud computing, mobile applications, and open-source software, many other people wonder if the mainframe era is over or if they will go with the times. What will be the future of mainframes in 2025?

The Current State of Mainframes

Today mainframes continue to be a vital part of many large companies. According to a CyberTheory survey, 71 percent of the Fortune 500 companies still depend on mainframes to operate main business applications and process over 30 billion transactions per day.

Why are mainframes still in such wide-scale use? They are very reliable, scalable, secure, and high throughput when it comes to transactions, batch processing, and data integration, which is difficult to achieve with distributed systems. Because mainframes are able to handle high volumes of time-sensitive, mission-critical data, they are especially well-suited to do so. Find more info on how to use your mainframe more efficiently.

For example, according to IBM, their z15 mainframe can process 1 trillion transactions per day and is scalable up to 40+ cores for massive parallelism. In addition, it offers encrypted data by nature and accelerates learning from data with machine learning.

Mainframes also have decades of existing legacy applications and data that would require massive migration efforts to move away from them. Keeping this legacy infrastructure running smoothly often makes more financial and operational sense than ripping and replacing it.

Challenges Facing Mainframes

However, while mainframes remain embedded in many large organizations today, they do face some key challenges:

Lack of Mainframe Skills

With fewer younger developers trained on mainframe technologies, the issue of mainframe skills shortage is becoming worse as existing mainframe experts retire. A

Technology Rigidity

Mainframes may be accurate workhorses, but they may not have the velocity and agility as may be provided sooner in a cloud environment. Also, new development gets hiked due to the lack of exposure to modern programming languages and DevOps practices.

High Costs

The total cost of operating mainframes remains high between the actual hardware/software, energy demands, and required skills. These costs make migration to cheaper distributed systems or the public cloud increasingly appealing financially.

Vendor Lock-In

Companies relying on mainframes are often wedded to a single vendor like IBM or Unisys with limited options to introduce competition or alternative platforms. This vendor dependency puts organizations at a disadvantage in negotiating costs.

Forecasts on the Future of Mainframes

Given the current landscape, what do experts forecast for the future of mainframes over the next five years as we approach 2025? The opinions are mixed:

The Case for Mainframes Expanding Role

64% of large enterprises rely on mainframes for integrating their workload into the cloud and offloading batch workloads.

According to Market Research Future, the mainframe market will grow at a 5.27 percent CAGR between 2025 and 2034 due to demand in China, emerging markets, and the continued reliance on financial services and insurance industries.

72% of organizations say mainframes will continue to be critical over the next decade.

The above forecasts suggest that while growth may be modest, mainframes will still play an essential role for the foreseeable future. The unique attributes of mainframes continue to make them well-suited for certain high-volume transactional workloads.

The Case for Mainframes Declining Role

However, other predictions paint a bleaker picture for traditional mainframes:

63% of mainframe organizations expect to move at least some mainframe workloads to the public cloud over the next five years.

PR Newswire estimates that 50% of legacy applications currently hosted on mainframes consider migration to more modern distributed platforms.

The above outlook suggests many organizations are looking to “offload” certain workloads from mainframes to take advantage of flexibility, cost savings, and skills from cloud platforms and open ecosystems. While they are unlikely to disappear entirely, mainframes could take on a more reduced legacy role.

Key Mainframe Modernization Strategies

Most experts agree that mainframe usage will either grow modestly or sharply decline, but organizations will have to modernize their mainframe environments in 2025 either to get full value from mainframes or make the migration of applications easier. Some of the important modernization strategies are:

1. Containerization. By containerizing monolithic mainframe applications into microservices, it allows for these services to be more portable across platforms and accessible to modern DevOps toolchains. Middleware platforms like Zowe from the Open Mainframe Project enable this.
2. Cloud Integration. High-speed, low-latency network connections let public cloud platforms directly access mainframe resources. This makes it possible to seamlessly move data and workloads between environments. IBM z/OS Cloud Broker is an example connector solution.
3. Application Re-Platforming. For applications where there is limited value in the continued use of mainframe infrastructure, re-platforming allows for migrating languages, data, and processing onto distributed systems, like private or public cloud platforms. Micro Focus and other vendors offer tools to facilitate this transition.
4. Open Source Adoption. Open-source languages (Go, Python, Java, JS) and frameworks are used to use modern skills and tooling on mainframes. For example, the Compuware Topaz suite makes this open-source development experience available directly on the mainframe.

The above strategies, with a combination of evolution and migration, will likely define the future of most mainframe environments leading into 2025.

Scenarios for the Future of Mainframes

We can outline several plausible scenarios for the future of mainframes in the 2025 timeframe by synthesizing the research and trends.

Scenario 1: Mainframes Continue Gradual Decline

In this scenario, mainframes continue their gradual decline as more workloads get moved to alternative distributed and cloud platforms. In 2025, they are left with only the most mission-critical, transactional applications that are too difficult to migrate. Their footprint shrinks, but they don’t disappear entirely.

Scenario 2: Mainframes Find Renewed Purpose

Mainframes evolve here to perform other functions. As integration capabilities are being increased, they function as centralized hubs for the aggregation of data across different systems. In addition, they offload batch processing workloads from public clouds. Containers and open-source access make their flexibility better. They are now specialized engines in hybrid environments.

Scenario 3: The Mainframe Divide

Under this scenario, the future divides between different mainframe user groups. Large financial services and insurance sector players double down on mainframes to fuel growing transaction volumes. Meanwhile, other industry sectors migrate a subset of workloads and decrease reliance on traditional mainframes due to skills and cost constraints. The end state has both thriving and declining mainframe environments.

Recommendations for Organizations

So given these potential scenarios, what should companies relying on mainframes today do to prepare for 2025? Here are some recommendations:

• Assess Application Portfolios. Identify all applications that are running on the mainframe, look at their priority of importance, and understand how they’re interdependent. Modernization can be performed by refactoring, replacing, or re-platforming, and such knowledge will help make smarter decisions on the approaches.
• Develop Mainframe Migration Roadmaps. With regard to application assessments and the future platform strategy, develop multi-year roadmaps to ensure a smooth pipeline transition of our application over some period of time. Establish clear criteria as to when migrations should take place.
• Up-Skill Employees on Mainframe Alternatives. Teams should be trained on distributed programming languages (Java, .Net, etc.) and cloud platforms for future migration. Embrace DevOps culture and tooling.
• Incorporate Mainframe Abstraction Layers. Portability over environment boundaries and easy migration in the future can be achieved by putting core mainframe services in the form of APIs and microservices.
• Leverage Open-Source Communities. Support mainframe-focused open-source groups like Open Mainframe Project to gain tooling, skills, and best practices on how to keep mainframes relevant. Promote open-source internally.

Conclusion

The future of mainframes in 2025 is filled with uncertainty. There are various scenarios that could occur, such as the decline of legacy platforms, the evolution of specialized engines, or the emergence of two distinct worlds. Organizations can carefully get ready for any of these outcomes by looking at their application portfolios, planning how they will migrate in the future, teaching their staff about new technologies, removing infrastructure dependencies, and using open source.

In 2025, change and migration are indeed coming, and companies that take advantage of today’s strengths of mainframes combined with transition plans in place will be well positioned for a successful future of enterprise computing, whether mainframes are front and center or move to the wings. The next 3-4 years will determine the decisions.