Achieving a modernized business is easier than ever before with the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center.

How do you approach mainframe application modernization? Your applications continue to serve the business well and are the culmination of years of investment and institutional knowledge. But they need modernization to better meet the needs of a digitally transformed business.

Do you move these applications to a public cloud and take on the associated complexity, cost and risk of migration to achieve some potential benefit? Or do you build on your current foundation with a more targeted and continuous approach to modernization, leveraging the public cloud alongside other technologies as part of a hybrid cloud approach?

State Farm’s modernization story

State Farm recently faced such a problem. The company wanted to draw maximum competitive advantage from their existing core systems running on the IBM Z® platform, while simultaneously outpacing smaller and more nimble rivals. To accomplish this, they needed to accelerate the development of new digital services integrated with core business systems.

As a solution, State Farm is implementing DevOps pipelines and practices on IBM z/OS systems by using modern industry-standard tools to promote consistent, modern development.

“Developing modern DevOps tooling and practices is enabling a single high speed of development across the entire enterprise,” says State Farm IT architect Mark Moncelle.

BNP Paribas’s modernization story

To improve quality and efficiency, BNP Paribas is overhauling the software development environment for its core systems. Working with IBM to deploy a modern Integrated Development Environment (IDE) backed by open-source tools, BNP Paribas is transforming the development environment on the IBM Z platform, saving money and boosting quality.

“The more we can expose applications and business logic running on IBM Z, the more value we can add to the business and to our clients,” says Abdelhakim Loumassine, head of the mainframe division for BNP Paribas.

With agile, modern development practices and services in place, BNP Paribas can now seamlessly use business-critical data and transactions on IBM Z within its hybrid cloud strategy.

How a business-aligned modernization strategy yields greater ROI

In a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study, 71% of executives say mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy. Four out of five respondents say their organizations need to rapidly transform to keep up with competition, which includes modernizing mainframe-based apps and adopting a more open approach. The report confirms that executives view modernizing mainframe-based applications — and connecting them with new applications through a hybrid cloud environment — as crucial to driving a holistic digital transformation strategy across the mainframe and cloud.

IBM recommends a business-aligned continuous approach to application modernization that allows businesses to build on existing investments, targeting only required application changes. Why rewrite 100% of your entire application portfolio if only 20% needs to be modernized? IBM’s approach starts by building on your current foundation.

Optimize hardware and software costs while streamlining application performance and management. By integrating IBM Z into a hybrid cloud platform to fully leverage cloud-native development, you’ll unlock additional revenue by increasing access to mainframe data for analytics and AI through an API and data-modernization strategy.

As a result, you’re more empowered to increase business agility by moving from a waterfall development to an enterprise DevOps process and an automated continuous CI/CD pipeline that is fully aligned to business priorities and is open and standard across the business, allowing for greater sharing of tools, skills and expertise.

And finally, reduce time-to-value with proven application modernization patterns, acceleration tools and best practices that include prescriptive “how-to” guides and showcases for modernizing and deploying on IBM z/OS and zLinux, IBM LinuxONE and public clouds together.

By taking a more continuous approach to modernization with IBM Z and public cloud, you can lower costs and increase ROI more than with application migration to public clouds alone. In fact, the TCO of modernizing an enterprise application with public cloud alone is up to 80% higher than on IBM Z.

How to get started

Achieving a modernized business is easier than ever before with the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center, featuring IBM Consulting and the many ecosystem partners available to help IBM Z clients accelerate the modernization of their applications, data and processes in an open, hybrid cloud architecture.

Accelerate application modernization with the new IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack — a flexible, integrated application modernization and IT automation platform for IBM Z and cloud. Learn more about z/OS Development and Test as-a-service in the IBM Cloud.