Mainframes had run the world for more than 70 years with organisations such as large banks and financial institutions, oil and gas companies, aviation business, manufacturing and mission critical apps all being maintained on mainframes.

Mainframes in business apps used Cobol. As more platform-agnostic computer languages developed, there happened a migration — either partial or full. Some still continue to use mainframes for their core operations.

Many thought mainframes are obsolete. However, there is renewed interest in mainframes — it has lately been recognised that both on-premise and cloud deployments should co-exist.

In addition, mainframes market is likely to grow on account of adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) and production of massive data.

It is not economical to transfer the entire applications to cloud. To achieve economies of scale, companies continue to use mainframes. Mainframe systems are robust, support volume, variety and velocity of data. These days there is focus on data analytics, and maintaining data on mainframes lead to quick data integration solutions.

However, manpower working on mainframes is retiring. New professionals are not skilled in mainframes to replace the outgoing manpower. Academic institutions do not teach mainframes and Cobol curricula. Out of top 100 banks, 92 have invested in mainframes. And 70% of large corporations have invested in mainframes. To serve this sector, there is dearth of manpower.

Prior to moving apps from mainframes to cloud, organisations examine whether the front end could be maintained with new tools while retaining backend on the mainframes with connectors.

Organisations can tap the retired manpower and ask them back to work to meet the manpower shortage. The tenure of retiring persons can be extended. IBM and universities should continue to teach this curriculum. New generation should be motivated to build careers in mainframes.

For the first time, Cobol, the programming language was used in 1959. It still powers many critical systems, but the number of Cobol developers are declining. The way out is to convert Cobol codes into Java codes. There are many Java coders but the conversion task is very laborious.

IBM announced in September 2023 that generative AI will be used to do this conversion. ChatGPT was introduced towards the end of November 2022. Generative AI models are excellent at code generation. They can be made to learn codes written in past decades. All that one has to do now is to set the content, set the direction and the machine will do the conversion. The costs come down dramatically.