We move on from the Part 1 Webinar Recap to discuss the 2022 Mainframe Modernization Business Barometer Report, summarizing findings from our survey of IT leaders on the state of today’s mainframes and the challenges enterprises face.
Advanced’s VP of Marketing and Product Rob Anderson spoke to our panel of modernization experts - Managing Director Tim Jones, Global VP Sales David Wurman, and Head of Development John Regan from Advanced’s Application Modernization division - to get their take on the report’s findings.
Watch the full discussion or read on for our pick of the report’s most interesting results.
Over the years Java has grown in popularity as the most prominent enterprise programming language. In recent months, Python has gained popularity as well. On the surface, this may seem surprising, as if Python aims to replace Java as the frontrunner. However, each is used for different purposes – Java tends to be more enterprise focused and Python tends to be more adept in the mobile app space. Can you shine any light on this?
Tim Jones: “Python is a hugely popular language, and if you look at the recruitment for a particular language, I think Python surpasses Java nowadays. However, for the systems that you take off a mainframe, for example transaction processing, then C# and Java are better suited.”
John Regan: “We do predominantly see people go into Java and C# due to having already built up their skills, but I do think new technologies are coming and will eventually overtake.”
Why is moving to the cloud so attractive?
Rob Anderson: “Scalability and elasticity make the cloud very flexible; infrastructure as code - the ability for automated orchestration that is application driven is unique and aids innovation.”
Tim Jones: “On your point about scalability, it's interesting that it’s at the top of the list, above having managed cloud solutions. I do wonder whether that's a result of the pandemic. We saw unprecedented demand in some areas coming into certain systems. If you've got fixed CPU ceiling, people are hitting that. So I can totally see why the horizontal scalability becomes really attractive in the post pandemic time that we're in.”
Skills are decreasing more rapidly than in the past. Is that due to the macro environment or is it simply a side effect of a lot of people retiring?
Tim Jones: “Skills are not going to disappear overnight, but it will be a problem that worsens over time. I remember back in the 1990s when they were saying there will be no more COBOL programmers anymore, yet 30 years later it's all COBOL programmers. But of course it is a finite resource pool. We know there's nobody coming out of colleges and universities learning COBOL, so there is still demand against a shrinking resource pool.”
David Wurman: “It's not only the kind of the technical experience that is decreasing; it's also the subject matter expert within an organization who knows these applications who might have been developed over decades. So how did they integrate with the application? How did they add security? How did they architect the database in such a way that now the applications are layered over it, and so on?”
To learn more, watch the full discussion with our panel of modernization experts.
Get the results from our latest survey and research on all things mainframe.
