Modernize mission-critical applications with AI at the core
Mainframe evolution strategies to unlock AI innovation
In today’s fast‑moving digital world, modernizing mainframe applications is a key step in any successful transformation strategy. IBM Consulting® helps organizations unlock the full potential of their mainframe systems. It reduces the risk in hybrid multi‑cloud environments, ensuring every workload runs where it delivers the most value and making modernization straightforward.
Whether your goal is to understand business logic buried in legacy code, refactor applications or identify the best platform for each workload, our experts can guide you every step of the way.
With AI‑powered tools, proven assets and strong industry partnerships, we accelerate modernization from initial discovery to deployment. This approach improves agility, lowers costs and gives your business a competitive edge that wasn’t possible before.
Enable organizations to assess, optimize and plan the evolution of core mainframe environments. With deep expertise, we guide modernization choices, cost efficiency and roadmap decisions to align mainframe investments with business goals and future technology needs.
We modernize and build mission‑critical applications on IBM z/OS® to cut costs, boost efficiency and unlock cloud‑native innovation—keeping your core systems relevant in an AI and hybrid cloud world.
We develop and modernize applications on Linux for IBM Z®, combining agility, enterprise‑grade security and seamless integration with cloud to drive faster digital transformation.
We adapt and migrate workloads from mainframe to cloud or distributed environments—freeing your business to scale, innovate and reduce operational costs.
We upgrade legacy applications from IBM System i (AS/400) and AIX® to modern, cloud‑ready platforms—preserving critical functions while improving performance and agility.
We revitalize applications from non‑IBM platforms, enabling hybrid cloud integration and future‑ready operations while maximizing the value of your existing investments.
Priorities for mission-critical modernization
Modernization decisions need to balance performance, cost and control across hybrid environments.
Support mission-critical work predictably, at scale and under sustained load. This capability includes the applications and transaction flows that cannot afford disruption once AI becomes part of day-to-day operations.
Make cost behavior more stable, visible and easier to govern. As modernization efforts expand, workload decisions that reflect both technical fit and long-term financial impact are needed, as more executives move away from cloud-first defaults.
Build in control, compliance and data sovereignty from the start. For organizations running critical workloads across mainframe, cloud and distributed environments, trust must be part of the architecture, not something added later.
Use cases
- Assess and design
- Fast code refactoring
- Portfolio optimization
- Data migration
- Data archiving
- Natural and Adabas modernization
Our automated assessment service facilitates business rules extraction, code tracing and documentation tools and services to significantly reduce your organization’s legacy code footprint.
We offer fast and accurate code conversion with guaranteed functional equivalence. We are able to refactor COBOL, CICS, CA Gen, ADS/O and other languages to a more appropriate counterpart.
Our optimizations solutions are for customers who want to keep their IBM mainframe applications, reduce operational costs and extend their capabilities to support new business requirements.
In tandem with our refactoring solution, our automated solution delivers modern cloud-enabled databases and supporting applications that are functionally equivalent to their original counterparts.
Our tools allow you to retain your legacy source code and data in an easily accessible repository. This repository remains available when you migrate away from the mainframe as part of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation or reengineering effort.
We offer both automated refactoring and rehosting solutions for Software AG (SAG) modernization. These features include Natural to COBOL, Java™ or C#, migrating Adabas data to a relational model and rehosting natural applications in a hybrid environment.
Strategic partnerships
AWS consulting services
Using agile methodologies and extensive reusable blueprints, we can help speed your design, migration and operation on AWS Cloud regardless of your industry segment.
BCC Iccrea Group collaborated with IBM to integrate external services, saving 65% of their application integration effort.
The California DMV worked with IBM Consulting and IBM watsonx.ai® to analyze 6 million lines of legacy code—reducing modernization discovery timelines from five years to 15 months.
Insights
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