Bridging Mainframe and Cloud Data Environments with VirtualZ’s Jeanne Glass

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

I'm happy to, uh, well actually welcome back to our show today, Jeanie Glass. Jeanie is the CEO of virtual Z. And, uh, you know, that should give you a hint as to what the company does, but we're gonna let her tell us about it.

Hey, Jeanie, welcome to Text Drug tv or welcome back to Text Drug tv. It's great to have you on. Yeah, thanks, Alan.

I'm thrilled to be back with you. Thank you. Very cool.

Jeanie, before we jump into virtual Z, you know, you are the CEO there. Um, people always wanna know, you know, how'd you get there? What'd you do?

Or what's your story or journey? If you don't mind, why don't you share? I'm sure there are people out here who are interested.

Sure. Thank you, Alan. Uh, so my experience, uh, uh, in computing goes back to college.

Actually. I have an MIS degree. I started out cobalt programming on the mainframe, uh, back, uh, in college.

And, uh, fast forward, spent most of my career, uh, in IT training and largely in enterprise software sales. I spent several years at Computer Associates where I met the majority of my co-founders. Uh, Vince Ray, uh, was, uh, head of, uh, development at Computer Associates.

He's our, uh, CTO at virtual z Mark SoCal, founder of Realia cobol, um, also held by Broadcom today, um, is our chairman and, uh, so forth. So I spent many years at computer associates, uh, in mainframe computing, and also several years in, uh, enterprise cybersecurity. And when I had the idea for virtual Z, in fact, mark Soka was my first phone call because I hadn't spoken to him in, in 15 years.

Uh, and I called him and said, Hey, I have an idea. I knew he would know if it had any merit or not. And then we pulled our, our team together that we have today.

And the idea that I had really evolved, uh, to something, um, you know, much, uh, uh, I think more, uh, important, uh, to the market. Um, you know, when you put people like Mark Combs, Vince Ray, mark Sole, and others in a room, you know, an idea that maybe it was this big, uh, becomes an idea this big, uh, Vince largely, uh, built the portfolio that's now held by Broadcom. And so the collaboration has been incredible.

And today we have three, uh, enterprise software solutions in our portfolio connecting, uh, the mainframe to the cloud for data access. Very cool. Very cool.

So you kind of mentioned a little bit here about virtual Z, but if, if I, you know, for our audience out here, if we could give them a succinct, sort of 32nd minute pitch as to, okay, this is who virtual Z is and what we do. Yeah. So we're modernizing data access.

Uh, today, accessing mainframe data is a significant business challenge for customers. It's largely achieved by making a copy of the mainframe data, sending it across the network, and dropping it down in the cloud. And that consumes MIPS network bandwidth.

And, you know, after all of that work, months of, uh, coding, uh, ETL coding, ELT coding, FTP coding, uh, with APIs and so forth, you know, months later, uh, you've designed, developed, tested, and now you are sharing data with our solutions. Um, all of our solutions are installed out of the box, and you're up and running and you're sharing data, uh, very quickly. Our most recent POC uh, customer installed lowen on a Wednesday, and I'll talk about our products in a minute, but our flagship product, lown, was installed on a Wednesday.

They were up and running on Tuesday, and they had signed off on the POC by Friday. So these solutions install out of the box, um, and again, provide real time read, write access to mainframe data that typically requires, uh, coding, mips, consumption, network bandwidth. And with all of those legacy methods, Alan, um, even if you're successful with all that coding development and you get, you, you do get the data finally to, um, uh, to the cloud.

So it can be used by your cloud applications. It's a day old or, or, or more. So you're running your business, you're running your inventory, you're service, you're servicing your customers, um, on day old data.

Um, so you really spend all that time, money, and energy for the luxury of running your business on day old data. With our technology, uh, it installs on the mainframe or mainframe software provider. All of our software, uh, is installed on the mainframe.

All of our software is zip eligible, which frees up your core mainframe, uh, capacity to run your business instead of using your mainframe to move data around. Um, so all of our software installs on the mainframe runs on the zip engine and your, you know, configured and up and running, uh, in, in very short order. And then of course, you've got a solution that's maintained by a software vendor not maintained by your own staff, uh, from a custom code homegrown approach, uh, to accessing the data.

Um, I'll just quickly tell you since you asked the, the solutions all are data access solutions connecting mainframe to other platforms, but it could be not just the cloud, it could be physical storage distributed systems. Our first product flagship product, Zen, uh, allows applications in the cloud to access mainframe data as if the data's in the cloud, right? They're local, but it's not, it's actually on the mainframe just being accessed read right in real time.

Our second solution propels, um, for customers who have requirements for just a one-time push of data, I just need to take this packet of data and send it across my network and get it somewhere else, uh, propels allows that onetime, uh, push of a, a component of mainframe data. You know, it could be defeated a data lake or to the case may be, and again, this is outta the box with, uh, propels. You could install propels today and, and be propelling your first, uh, set of data tomorrow.

And then our third solution, Zach, um, allows mainframe applications to access data in the cloud as if it's shared DSS dsd, as if it's on the mainframe. But now the data is in the cloud, and the mainframe applications are accessing that data in real time. So, for example, if you need, uh, access to storage on the mainframe, instead of spinning up physical storage, you can spin up storage in the cloud at a fraction of the cost and access it today.

Um, so all of our solutions are real time read, write, install on the mainframe, and allow data access. So wherever the application is, put it wherever it's best for your business to run, wherever the data is, put the data, wherever it's best for your business and for your customers to have it. Our solutions allow you to get at those applications and data in real time out of the box.

Love it. Love it. You know, Jeannie, would I wanna make sure our audience understands when you, when you talk about the way a lot of people are moving data from mainframe to cloud, for instance, it's not, the best way to analogy I could use is think about when Windows first started making it, that you could, like, let's say take your spreadsheet and embed it into a PowerPoint.

Remember how clunky that was, right? It, it was, it was really kind of taking a picture of the spreadsheet and putting it into PowerPoint. Then they came out with the live dynamic linking where you could actually work in your spreadsheet in PowerPoint, right?

And that, I mean, that was earth shattering in its day, right? Because you could, you could dynamically have data, right? So I made this presentation to do a presentation next week, but next week when I put it on there, it showed the real, the, the new data, you know, the up to the minute data, that's kind of where we were with, with the, the, the mainframe data, right?

We would take a picture, a snapshot, if you will, and shoot it up to the cloud and, and work off of that. But it was just a moment in time, number one. And number two, it wasn't live linked back.

So anything we did in terms of manipulating that data here, we then had to do the reverse osmosis to bring that back into the mainframe. And by the time it did, it was old again. So it was always a day late and a dollar short.

And, you know, who wants to do that? So, you know, when we talk about the ability now to dynamically do this and run off the data in the mainframe itself, it it's that same kind of hyper leap, if you will. It is, this is, uh, innovative, uh, patented, uh, technology.

This is really hard for customers to conceptualize. If you, we always say, you know, the horse and buggy was an innovation at one time, and then it just wasn't practical anymore. And ETL and ELT and those methods, they're not practical anymore.

Uh, you know, research shows customers, 50% of customers say there's something that I need to do for my business, for business agility that I cannot do because those legacy methods don't work anymore. Uh, so this is a time, a time sensitive solution, uh, for mainframe customers who need access to the mainframe data. And one of the hardest things we, um, encounter in, in talking about our products is the customer really understanding that we don't touch the data.

We don't, we don't touch the data. The data stays securely and safely on the mainframe, and it is used by mainframe applications, and it is shared with cloud and distributed applications as peers. Um, so we're not moving or replicating data.

We're improving your security posture significantly by leaving your sensitive business data on the mainframe secured by your mainframe security protocol, whatever that may be. Um, and stop sending your data across your network and, and dropping it down here and dropping it down there. It's, it stays securely and safely on the mainframe and it's shared with mainframe applications as if they're local.

And there's also a number of benefits to that. Um, you know, interdependencies, you don't have to worry about break, about breaking any sort of interdependencies in addition to, you know, the day old aspects. And as you mentioned, if you make a change to the data that copy that you've moved to the cloud, you do need to reconcile those changes back to the mainframe.

That's typically called change data capture. And that's a whole nother set of development. Um, and architecture you need to design, build, and maintain.

So keeping data copies, you know, syncing res sinking, it's incredibly, uh, costly. It consumes up to 40% of the customer's MIPS capacity, uh, to use ETL. And, uh, just the custom coding is, uh, it's cost prohibitive at this point for customers such that it's preventing them from doing things they need to do to run their business and stay competitive.

Yeah. You know, you mentioned the security. That was the second point I wanted to make, is when you start taking that data off the mainframe, you, you kinda lose, I mean, you know, dollar for dollar or penny for penny, it's, it's more secure on that mainframe and it is some, whether it's on the cloud or just an on-prem kind of storage or what have you.

Um, you guys also recently announced, uh, uh, some financing, if you don't mind, talk about that a little bit. We're really excited about that. Um, quite honestly, Alan, it's, uh, difficult to raise capital in this market.

Um, most people can't believe the success that we've had in our, uh, financial backing of the company, uh, given the market dynamics. But also we believe that we're the first new mainframe, uh, company to enter the mainframe space since around 2012. I don't have the exact figures, but it's a long time since there's been a new mainframe software company, uh, uh, enterprise software company brought to market for the mainframe.

And so investors aren't used to investing in mainframe technology. They generally don't have mainframe experts on their teams who can do due diligence. And so we were very fortunate, um, to work with, uh, next Frontier Capital, uh, and our lead investor will price, he had led, uh, around for MuleSoft.

Um, and he understood immediately the problem, the industry is spacing. And he understood immediately the value and importance of our software in solving the problem and the innovative nature of our software. And then of course, our team, you know, having somebody who largely is behind the, you know, entire mainframe portfolio held by Broadcom today, you know, we had all the right ingredients, the right people, the right product, uh, the right problem and the right solution, uh, to that problem.

And so, um, we've just been so fortunate, uh, to work with next Frontier Capital, um, and Will Price and his team in particular. And then, uh, they've of course, uh, introduced us to other investors, um, like two M companies, inosphere, next Coast Ventures, um, who have made additional investments as well. We're using those investments to build out our sales organization and also to expand our development.

You know, we have an extensive roadmap to continue, uh, to build and help customers with, um, data access, uh, challenges. Um, so we're doing quite a bit of additional, uh, innovation as we speak and then, uh, working on our go to market, um, adding additional partnerships, building our direct sales organization and so forth. I love it.

What a great story. And you're right, you don't hear a lot, actually, not a new mainframe company, but didn't rock it by a a, I think maybe it was a division or something recently. They, they bought, um, they bought the microfocus, um, portfolio from, Well, not mi, what do they call it?

OpenText? Yeah. Which was Micro Focus, which was I guess the h was that the HP business that Microfocus bought?

Yeah, it went to Micro Focus then the OpenText and now over the Rocket. But, you know, but that's more recycling. It, it's not necessarily, it's not, It's not a new innovation.

It's not a new software company coming to market. That's right. And the other notable piece that I'll mention about, uh, virtual Z that we're really excited about, um, is virtual Z is the first woman founded, uh, mainframe software company in the history of the mainframe.

And the mainframe is celebrating its 60 year anniversary, April 7th of next. This is what it took. Congratulations to you.

Yes. And also, uh, Vance, our CTO and I are both of Native American heritage. In fact, Lowen was a female Apache warrior.

Lowen was known for her fearlessness. I Remembered this in the last time I interviewed you now. Okay.

It takes a little while for me to connect dots, but okay. So she was for our first product name. And so we're also excited about that aspect of the company.

We think that's really important, and, uh, we're proud of that, uh, as well. Very cool. Jeanie, for people who want to get more information, I, I know it's virtual Z, right?

com? Orio? com.

Okay. com. Check it out.

Jeannie, congratulations on the money raise. Congratulations on the success of the company. Keep doing it.

You know, we, we cover a lot of mainframe stuff here on, on Techstar. We work with the Open Mainframe Group at Linux Foundation as well. com especially a lot of COBOL people, believe it or not, our COBOL articles get crazy amounts of hits.

I know people out there may not realize it, but they do. 'cause there's a lot of COBOL people out there. Um, keep doing what you're doing.

Don't wait so long to come back on. Okay, That sounds great, Alan. Great to see you.

Thank you so much. Have A Jeanie Glass, CEO of virtual Z, bringing your mainframe data to your modern applications and platforms as well in a secure, uh, dynamic way. We're gonna take a break here on Textron.

We'll be back in a minute.