IBM admits mainframes need to be modernized and will use AI to do the job

IBM touts its Z series mainframes as the most reliable and cost-effective environments for certain workloads, but on Monday also acknowledged that the platform can drift towards hard-to-manage complexity that reduces resilience and therefore needs some help from AI.

Big Blue admitted that not all mainframe estates exist in a state of perfect bliss in a Statement of Direction for a forthcoming product called “IBM Z Atlas” that the document describes as “an AI-native solution that uses system intelligence to ground AI skills and agents in the context of key workflows like planning and validating changes or modernizing applications and infrastructure.”

“It intends to map a client's entire z/OS stack across infrastructure, middleware, and applications, and then use that system intelligence to reduce the manual effort of tasks like patch management, regulatory response, and sharing knowledge across every team, from systems programmers to application developers.”

Big Blue also hopes the tool helps mainframe techs and ops teams “better understand how components connect, interact, and depend on one another.”

“IBM Z Atlas intends to eliminate the leading cause of unplanned z/OS outages – changes that aren't proven to be safe – by mapping how a change impacts the z/OS stack, testing it, and validating it,” the Statement of Direction adds. “This design accelerates clients' modernization efforts by keeping experts in control and giving every practitioner, in operations or development, the same shared Z system visibility to reduce risk.”

IBM reckons Z Atlas will help mainframe shops do four things:

• Understand systems and dependencies before making decisions or initiating changes
• Assess potential impacts, risks, and operational considerations
• Accelerate planning for modernization, deployment, and provisioning
• Provide trusted context for AI-native experiences and automation

While IBM clearly sees AI has a role in helping its customers to manage mainframes, it appears not to be going all-in on AIOps – the emerging practice of allowing agents to either keep tech infrastructure humming, or autonomously find issues and develop proposed fixes.

“IBM intends for AI-assisted insights and recommendations to preserve appropriate human review and decision authority,” the Statement of Direction reads.

The multiple mentions of modernization caught your correspondent’s eye, because IBM’s many rivals often suggest the best way to modernize mainframes is by trashing them and moving the applications they run to another platform. In recent years, vendors have suggested using generative AI to rewrite mainframe apps in other languages, an idea that analyst firm Gartner thinks is highly overrated.

IBM clearly wants modernization to mean making mainframes easier to live with so that customers persist with the platform, a critical outcome as the company’s revenue spikes when each new generation of Z-series machines hits the market. Indeed, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna last week said the current Z17 generation of mainframes has outsold all others by $1 billion.

That kind of result well and truly puts to bed the “death of the mainframe” narrative that, like next year becoming the Year of Linux on the Desktop, is a prediction that never goes away and never comes to fruition. With Z Atlas, IBM seems to be trying to ensure rumors of the mainframe’s demise are even more exaggeratedly false. ®