The Future of Mainframe Modernization

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. I'm happy to introduce you to my next guest.

Her name is Robin McFarland. Robin is the president and CEO of R Rrr Mac, or Rrr Mac Associates. Robin, welcome to Tech from tv.

It's great to have you on here. Thank you Al. Nice to meet you.

So Robin, this is your first time on and, um, you know, our audience are tech people. They're developers. They're cybersecurity folks.

Everybody's an AI person today, CIS ops, but you know, tech people are funny like this. They wanna know who's talking to them. Why, what, what credibility does this person bring in here?

Why should we believe him or her? So, and I know you've got a great background and a great career arc. If you wouldn't mind without embarrassing you, give us a little bit of your career story.

Alright, so my career, um, started in the early seventies. I started on key punch cards as an EAM operator, borrowing the boards for, for sorters and collators. And then from that I came up through the tape library, computer operations, tech support.

I was an assembler programmer, I was an auto coder programmer. And I've been blessed in my career that I've done most of the jobs from wiring, you know, busing tag cables into hardware, to doing software installs. I became a systems manager for a large insurance company.

Left that and went to work for a startup, uh, company was one of the, uh, developers of the change van product for SERE software. Did that for about 15 years and then formed Armac as a consulting company in 2005. And our focus has been, uh, migrations, modernizations, converting customers from one software product to another, whether it's an SCM, uh, you know, a change management product or a security product, or also doing disaster recovery.

Very cool. You know, I, I relate, I I've also been work working in this industry that this long, I, Robin, before you had come back on, we were off camera in the green room talking to some of your people. You know, we were talking about the, the tightness of the mainframe community.

Right. At some point everyone had a real connection to IBM, it seems. Mm-hmm.

But, you know, over the years there's really, you know, on the, on the main level, you, you had some, some, you know, maybe big four or five companies ca that's now part of Broadcom, you mm-hmm. Today's open text, you know, was, was, uh, they had acquired, um, I forgot the name of the company they acquired again. I I have a mental block, but they themselves had acquired, I think was Micro Focus.

Hp Yeah. Micro Focus had acquired, was it HPE or something like that, or hp they, they, before they called it HPE. Right.

Um, today's Rocket Software has bought Serena software, which I know you have a Right. A connection. Right.

They have all the Serena products that I worked on. Yep. Um, it's like nothing ever dies or fades away.

We just kinda recycle a little bit. And, and we, and the people are the same. They, it's like, you know, there was an old Twilight Zone thing like this where a guy kept reliving a trial, but every day, you know, today was the judge.

Tomorrow the guy playing the judge was the district attorney and the guy playing the district attorney was the defense attorney. The next day it was that, you know, Groundhog Day kind of thing. And to a certain extent, the mainframe, the mainframe industry is like that.

It's a very, uh, connected, interconnected, tangled, even, uh, web of, of, of people and, and, uh, and, and personalities. I I, we used to host the Open Mainframe Project podcast with the folks at the Open Mainframe from Linox Foundation. Oh wow.

And I had a chance to Yeah, yeah. For two years I did that. And I, you know, I don't know if you know Lenny, I forgot Lenny's last name.

Everyone knows Lenny from the mainframe piece there. He's an old IBM er, but now he, he has mm-hmm. Another company consulting.

But it, it's, if I had to describe it this way though, for many people, it's a labor of love. Right. Working on the mainframe is, no one said it's perfect, but it's damn good.

Right. And no matter what you say today, we could talk about the cloud and AI and, and everything that we're all talking about, you know, dollar for dollar, penny for Penny. Those mainframes are still out there cooking and, you know, and kudos to IBM too.

They keep coming out with the next gen and the next gen. Right. You know, is, is it, they do a great job with it.

If you don't mind though, Robin, I'd like to talk a little bit about RR Mac. Tell people about the, I mean, from the name, I'm assuming you founded it, but tell, tell us kind of the origin story and what it does and how it helps people today. Well, the, as I said this, the story is a typical story.

Um, I went to a startup and was a developer consultant, wore many hats implementing product, building products for years. And then, uh, we were going through some downsizing. So I left the company and started consulting, doing work for, at the time ca and, uh, Sena and implementing products and converting people from one product to the other.

That's where we started from. We grew the company. From there, we built software on a mission software for System Z.

And we started then mm-hmm. Going into, as the DevOps modernization started taking form, we started specializing in that. And so that's our main, main focus, right?

Is we modernize people going from say, not the mainframe, because your applications just still gonna run there. But taking them to bring the newer developers, younger developers on, because we older folk are retiring and that knowledge base is retiring. We're converting 'em to the tooling that they're learning in college.

Eclipse, you know, visual code. But having them work on mainframe applications. And so that's what my team does.

We move millions of files with our automation software, converting them, and to get it seems to be the big focus get and visual code. We're doing a lot of that right now. Hello.

I, I agree with that. You know, um, my friend Rosalyn from IBM, Rosalyn Rosaly, one of Also, yes, we're very good friends. Also, Rosalyn has done more for modernizing the mainframe, bringing DevOps people onto, you know, into a mainframe state of mind than anyone I know.

And, and it, but it, it's true. You know, especially the last few versions of z they really made it friendly to do come, uh, some of the CICD kinds of Yes. Activities.

And, and like you said, you don't have to know COBOL though. It's not that COBOL is the hardest language in the world, but you don't even, you know, it, it runs, it'll run what you, and I'm talking now, younger developers and so forth. It'll run on today's languages, it runs Java, it runs containers, it runs, you know what mm-hmm.

What we call cloud native, even, even though it's on the mainframe. So I, I guess my question to you is how do we, how do we complete or, or continue this bringing up the next generation, right? Because let me give you a little background.

All you hear with ai is AI's gonna replace the junior developers. AI's gonna, well if you replace all the junior developers, where are tomorrow's senior developers? It is like a birds and the bees question, right?

Where, where are tomorrow's developers coming from? Mm-hmm. It's, it's the same thing here with mainframe Robin.

You've been at this, as you said all these years. There's a lot of my friends in mainframe have been at it all these years. There is, we need a new generation to come in.

Now in India, you got a ton of people who study cobal 'cause they know there's good jobs to be had if you can, you know, write cobalt for mainframe. But where do, where, where is this next generation today? I, I guess, I guess it's, it's, I've seen the good and the bad of that because the modernization effort is to get the developers along the same platform.

So get the main framers working in Git and using Eclipse and using that same interface that the other younger developers are doing that are doing web and mid-range, et cetera. So that everybody's in the same playground and you can now take your changes. Where we've always had them separate, well these years, mainframe was doing its piece, while the web piece was going its own way, we weren't in the same pipelines.

We had to worry about timings. That's the first piece is getting that standardized everybody in the same playground. So our collaboration is better.

The one thing I see though is just giving them the tooling to manage those applications. You still have to instruct them in the language that they're managing. I think people still need to know Cobolt because 70% of our financial businesses still running in Cobolt.

As we look to modernize those applications with, you know, Watson next where we could take COBOL and maybe convert it to Java or something else, we still have to understand what the applications we're doing. We today educate those developers so that they could come up with a better, faster way of doing it. Just giving it to ai.

I think it's too risky personally. So I would look at a first get the tooling, get everybody collaborating better so that those mainframe developers that are running these legacy applications and maintaining them can mentor that, that younger set of what they do today. So they can look at building the better, the better breadbox, the better application faster, and take advantage of the hardware where there's so much that you said as Roseland has done a lot of work working on the modernization.

We've worked with IBM on that modernization in some sense, but, and we're delivering those products for whatever vendor it is. But mostly IBM is leading that. Um, I still think you have to educate those developers and let them know what they're going to take on in just saying, oh, here's cobol, convert it to Java.

You really have to give them all the nuances of something that's been running for 60 years. Yep. I wanna bring up another topic, Robin, that, and I didn't test your temperature on at first.

I don't know how you're gonna react, but another, a troubling thing I've seen in speaking to people in the mainframe industry is, for a lot of people modernizing mainframes is code for ripping mainframe, not ripping them out. 'cause they're impossible to rip out, but taking stuff off mainframes and moving them, migrating it to cloud or, or you know, other platforms. And I, I don't know if, if it makes sense, do it.

I'm not saying I like, I'm not that rigid or, or orthodox where, you know, I don't realize that things can change and there might be a better mouse chop. But there there is a lot of that you're seeing, I think in, in some corners of the mainframe market where, you know, people are saying, Hey, we need to, we need to start planning for the day we don't use the mainframe that we're migrating off mainframe. Now you've spent your life here, your whole career here.

What do you say to those people? Um, And this's a, a family show, don't see, I know, I was just be, I was trying to think of how I would say that. Uh, I don't see it going away.

9% uptime. Mm-hmm. So it's reliable, it's fast.

It can process those transactions. I think the role that the mainframe is playing, it's changing a little bit where it's becoming that big engine server to process those transactions and we're moving some of the work off of there. But I don't see it, I don't see the throughput in the cloud or in, in Lennox and servers that you're gonna get on it.

You just can't process it that fast when you're trying to process a million transactions. I've seen customers come off the mainframe and they had to go back because they just couldn't process what they needed to process. And these were big financial companies.

I won't name them, but I've seen them go back. So I think every platform serves its purpose. You know, use it, use it.

Well, you know, I, I just, I'm still not seeing the throughput that we need. Even when I take it something from COBOL and put it in Java that I'm getting the same speed or performance. I think once we address that, then maybe we can get there.

But today I don't. And, and I will admit I am a mainframe dinosaur. I love that big iron box.

We're in the process of purchasing another one ourselves. So Good for you. Um, And we do have servers and everything else, but still, Well, you, you have to today.

Um, right. Let me bring up another subject with you. Sure.

You mentioned IBM Watson, right? Mm-hmm. To a lot of people, Watson means ai, right?

And, and mm-hmm. And rightfully so. They, they kind of invented it.

Um, AI is having a tremendous effect in the broader DevOps community already. Right. In terms of pipelines and, and, and everything else.

What, if any effect are you seeing in the mainframe DevOps world or mainframe in general around AI and, and using AI or adoption of ai? Uh, because IBM is actually building it into the hardware. You know, they started with the Z 16 and now with the Z 17, there's even more there.

I think for the mainframe community. We're still trying to adapt, like what can we use that for it to be more effective and make better applications and take advantage of it? Because there mean, there were things that were put in COBOL where COBOL is addressing and accessing the hardware more efficiently.

Uh, I'm seeing my, my team, 'cause my, you know, our developer team, we cross over, you know, mainframe mid-range, you know, web, et cetera. They're using AI more for research and for doing a lot of code coverage kind of checking. I think that's where we are feeling comfortable because I'm still, you know, as, as dealing in security, we're very heavy in into security.

Also, I wanna make sure that we're protected and our customers are protected before someone's going out and using chat GBT tell me how to build this. So I'm, I'm a little bit, you know, more taking a cautious path to it, but I am seeing more and more customers taking advantage of it and using it more in their distributed applications than I'm seeing it in the mainframe style. But they are starting to do that now because of the initiative that IBM has put forward.

Yeah, no, I mean, from what I've read, believe it or not, you know, sometimes these things just work out this way. You know, within Nvidia, GPU chips, everybody, you know, it's $5 trillion company. Um, but the mainframe hardware actually runs AI inference and so forth pretty damn good.

Right, right. In in many ways superior to a lot of the, you know, it's still X 86 based architecture. A lot of what you see in just common cloud servers, right?

Correct. It actually will run better on that mainframe. Like, like many other things do.

Robin, I I didn't give you a chance. RRR Mac Associates, what's the website there? com.

Oh, that makes it easy. com. Mm-hmm.

And you know, for people out here working on mainframes or maybe looking at projects, modernizing, bringing DevOps, what give us the best on-ramp to, to work reach with you folks and, and how to work there, I guess? Yeah. When we first go into an, into an account, the first thing we do is discovery.

We wanna understand what are the issues that they have today. You wanna get to the, everybody wants this ROI, they wanna get to that endpoint, but we wanna understand what they're doing today. You can't change the developer's world overnight.

You can't rip out their testing. You know, the pipeline that's been on the mainframe where they're going into DB two CICS regions, they still need to do that to keep the lights on and satisfy their customers. Yeah.

So don't try to reinvent your pipeline overnight of what your distributed folks are doing. That's the me mistake I see off the top. But look at where you can be the most efficient for your developers so they can take advantage of the things that are available today in DevOps that they didn't have in the mainframe.

There's so much that they get even in the IDE for code coverage for syntax. Checking that on the green screen. We just don't have, unless we wrote it ourself in our racks or C list, I'd say take advantage of that tooling first.

I love it. Hey Robin, we're about outta time. 15 minutes goes quick here.

I know you had some network issues today and so I appreciate you coming on fighting through 'em. Hopefully it'll come out good for everyone who's watching this, but do come back, keep us posted and keep up the great work. 'cause it, it's important work that you're doing, right?

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

You're Welcome. Robin McFarland, president and CEO of RR Mac Rrr Mac Associates. com is the website.

Check it out. We're gonna take a break here on Text Trunk tv. We'll be back in a little bit.

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