Note: This video is part of our monthly series “T3M” aka “TFiR Topic Of The Month”; the topic for January was Cost Cutting vs Cost Efficiency. 

Guest: John Mertic (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Project: Open Mainframe Project (LinkedIn, Twitter)

In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with John Mertic, Executive Director of the Open Mainframe Project (OMP), to talk about the trends he is seeing within the mainframe ecosystem, particularly in terms of cost efficiency.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• With the current layoffs, staff numbers are actually reducing down to pre-COVID levels. This means there was overestimation in the past — companies hired up because of market demand for scarce talent. What is happening now is essentially a course correction, a reexamination of priorities and core competency.
• The overarching trend is efficiency and optimization. Companies are moving away from monolithic applications to services, multi-tiers, and things of that nature.
• Open-source mainframe communities are growing.
• The Zowe Project was really designed around the idea of making mainframe data more accessible to the rest of the enterprise. It kicked off a larger movement of using the mainframe as a part of the architecture for applications. Companies are seeing that it might be a better place for parts of their workload.
• Companies are looking at not just their personnel, but the software and services that they support and what makes sense. They’re looking at subscriptions, they’re looking at the different software they’re purchasing and figuring out if they’re a good use across the business or if there are other tools that they can use much more efficiently.
• The Open Review Initiative by the Academy Software Foundation is an example of what could happen next in the mainframe ecosystem. The project has contributions from Sony, DNEG, and Autodesk. Each has various review and approval tools for motion picture workflows. They’re going to contribute their tools to the project, pull the best pieces and make a canonical tool that the industry will eventually standardize on.
• When the economy is at a low point, there are a lot of mergers and acquisitions, but companies are certainly more actively interested in how to collaborate to be cost efficient. And that ends up being an additional driver.
• OMP technical collaboration projects such as Zowe and Feilong are getting more mature and getting more adoption.
• OMP projects that are more focused in educational areas, like the COBOL training course and the Mainframe Open Education, help companies on the skills aspect, those who are looking to recruit and identify talent.
• The recently launched Mainframe Modernization Working Group will help define the market and provide thought leadership by creating a common definition and framework around modernization in the mainframe space. In the short term, the group will focus on work in the area of cost cutting and cost optimization.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.