Results from Kyndryl’s second annual State of Mainframe Modernization Report survey show that 2024 will be the year of AI adoption on the mainframe. The survey also reaffirms that while modernization projects are delivering significant financial benefits, many organizations continue to face skills shortages, impeding the transformation of complex, mission-critical systems.
Companies face economic, competitive, technological and regulatory challenges every day, while increasingly seeking to transform and extract new value from their IT assets, including the mainframe. Kyndryl’s survey, which gathers testimony from 500 business and IT leaders who use this technology globally, reveals that 86% of respondents are rapidly adopting AI and generative AI to accelerate their mainframe modernization initiatives, a figure that in Spain reaches 95% of companies surveyed. In addition, a third of respondents say that the platform has become the foundation for running AI-enabled workloads. In addition, almost half intend to use generative AI to unlock and transform critical mainframe data into actionable information.
“The mainframe platform continues to play a vital role in the hybrid world and is evolving to serve new use cases, with AI and security increasingly influencing modernization plans. Kyndryl is at the forefront of this trend, providing mission-critical expertise to help customers achieve their goals,” he explains. Petra Goude, Global Practice Leader for Core Enterprise & zCloud at Kyndryl“By working with partners on their mainframe and AI modernization journey, enterprises can unlock new opportunities, improve resilience, mitigate skills challenges, and drive better outcomes. In this way, mainframes can continue to thrive and deliver strong business value in hybrid environments,” he adds.
The mainframe platform continues to play an essential role in the hybrid world and is evolving to serve new use cases.
According to respondents, IT modernization projects and patterns are producing substantial business results, including triple-digit one-year ROIs of 114% to 225% and collective savings of $11.9 billion annually. Nearly all organizations have opted for a hybrid IT strategy—a combination of mainframe modernization, public/private cloud integration, and moving applications and data off-premise. Additionally, 96% of respondents are migrating some workloads (36% on average) to the cloud.
Key factors driving mainframe investment in Spain
The study, conducted by Coleman Parkes Research for Kyndryl on the platform’s 60th anniversary, also considers the business factors that will drive and condition investment decisions in mainframe modernization in organizations in the short term. In the case of Spain, security and data modernization top the ranking, followed by user demand, artificial intelligence (including generative AI) and changes in business demand.
Other factors that are also part of the list of conditions to be taken into account regarding mainframe investment are sustainability, application modernization, increasing costs and regulatory compliance.
Visibility and key competencies
New this year, respondents identified visibility as one of the most important reasons for undertaking a technology modernization process at their organization. In fact, 92% of respondents indicated that a single dashboard is important for monitoring their operations, but 85% said they find it difficult to get it right. Kyndryl Bridge provides an open, AI-powered integration platform that can solve this challenge, helping organizations gain greater visibility, orchestration, and efficiency across their technology environments.
The survey also reflects how many respondents continue to grapple with skills shortages, especially in new areas such as generative AI. Security skills are also in high demand due to increasing compliance requirements, with nearly all respondents citing security as the key factor driving modernization decisions. With this increased pressure, the survey reveals that 77% of organizations are turning to third-party vendors to undertake mainframe modernization projects.
