With all our credit card transactions traveling through around seven mainframes, it is clear that mainframe technology is still playing a vital role in modern computing. Joe Winchester, Senior Technical Staff Member of the Open Mainframe Project (OMP) Zowe, discusses the project’s role in the mainframe ecosystem and the relevance of mainframe in the modern economy. He goes on to talk about the anticipated Zowe version 3 release as well as its significant growth of adoption. He says, “When most people think of the word mainframe, they generally think of the IBM z16 platform. It’s a very thoroughly modern computing architecture and it’s the backbone of transactional IT in the world.”

Zowe’s role within the ecosystem and the challenges it faces

• Winchester discusses the Zowe project’s inception and its role in the mainframe ecosystem, emphasizing its aim to introduce open-source methodologies and technology to a traditionally proprietary platform.
• Winchester shares the three core principles Zowe focuses on: making the mainframe platform more open, simple, and familiar.
• The Open Mainframe Project faces challenges with the need to balance integrating new developers familiar with modern technologies and maintaining support for the existing workforce and tools.

Mainframe technology and its relevance in modern computing

• Winchester explains the role mainframes play in today’s modern IT landscape. He debunks the misconception that mainframes are outdated highlighting the modern computing architecture of the IBM z16 platform.
• Winchester tells us how mainframes support critical business operations working alongside technologies like Kubernetes, and how this ensures that mainframes remain a backbone for many contemporary IT infrastructures.
• Winchester emphasizes the benefits that mainframe development offers modern developers as a career path, contrary to outdated perceptions. He notes how critical mainframes are in various industries, such as finance and government.

Learning initiatives for new developers to learn mainframe and mainframe role in the financial sector

• Winchester acknowledges the skills gap in the mainframe industry, talking about how the Open Mainframe Project aims to address it with learning initiatives. Nonetheless, he emphasizes the need for more efforts to bridge the skills gap and promote mainframe career opportunities.
• The Open Mainframe Project introduced a COBOL education course to meet the increased demand for COBOL programmers, especially in government sectors.
• Winchester emphasizes that mainframes are crucial for handling a significant portion of the world’s financial data due to their reliability, security, and speed.
• Mainframes are essential for Fortune 500 companies looking to expand into new markets and improve mobile and micro-payments since maintaining security and compliance remains a priority.

Adoption and growth of Zowe technology in mainframe computing

• Winchester talks about the significant growth of adoption of the Zowe project since its inception. Zowe achieved about 10% adoption among mainframe customers by the end of 2020, which had increased to around 85% by the end of 2023.
• Winchester attributes the rapid adoption of Zowe to a combination of education and enterprise support. He notes the educational sector’s pivot towards using Zowe in training courses has played a significant role.
• Enterprise support has also bolstered confidence in Zowe, offering robust 24/7 support and promoting it to their customers.

New features for Zowe version 3 and notable incubator projects within the Zowe community

• Version 3 of Zowe is currently in development with a release date pending.
• Winchester highlights two incubator projects in the Zowe community: an IntelliJ plugin donated by the IBA group and Zen, a tool that simplifies Zowe installation on z/OS environments.
• Version 3 aims to integrate the two incubator projects into the core platform, enhancing usability. The update will also address security concerns, and expand on Visual Studio Code features.

Mainframe use cases and the potential of AI advancements

• Winchester highlights two primary use cases for Zowe: DevOps and developer experience.
• AI advancements, such as LLMs, are anticipated to further enhance Zowe’s capabilities by leveraging accumulated knowledge to aid new users and improve application understanding.
• Winchester discusses the role of generative AI (GenAI) in mainframes, highlighting its significance in fraud detection. He talks about how crucial they are for verifying transactions allowing for real-time accurate fraud detection.
• Although mainframes are not ideal for building AI models, their co-location capabilities make them effective for executing these models.

Guest: Joe Winchester (Twitter)
Project: Open Mainframe Project (Twitter)
Show: Mainframe Matters

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.