Today’s information age is a knowledge-driven society surrounded by a high-tech global economy. With a diverse gamut of consumer products and services being conceptualized, marketed and sold, it has heralded a digital era transformation for consumers. With technology and communication costs being slashed to affordable levels, powerful smart phones and tablets have completely changed how we receive information, stay connected, explore personalized needs and simplify decision-making.

While the digital revolution has impacted back-office operations of the services business, mainframes continue to be stalwarts in processing billions of daily business transactions in many industries. They form a crucial part of the IT infrastructure including banking, insurance, retail, aviation and telecom. Top global banks and insurers, plus many Fortune 500 organizations are driven by IBM mainframes. However, the current competitive economy demands a far more dynamic IT to support these sectors.

The latest mainframe edition

IBM z14 is perhaps the fastest and most powerful transaction platform existing now. The latest edition of z series mainframe capable of running z/OS, Linux and Java offer unparalleled security, cost savings, availability and reliability in the datacenter. It is a part of a public / private / hybrid cloud server space that lets essential assets to be managed on-premise while granting controlled access to those in remote virtual data centers.

Apart from increased speed and enhanced security, the latest mainframe version supports technologies like containers, APIs, Java (at 1.5 times faster than on X86 platforms), Linux and on-demand service models.

Together with the technologies such as APIs, microservices and SOAs, the z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition allows mainframes to interact with web services. This makes the mainframe more connected to new digital services and applications, and effectively brings unmatched top-class performance for high volume transactions, reliability and security to the latest smart devices through the web and mobile apps

With Mainframe as a Service (MaaS), mainframe server MIPS can be availed via a Cloud interface, just like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings. With a consumption-based services model, MaaS enables charging only for the capacity used – and this makes small mainframe deployments possible. MaaS basically turns mainframe (on- or off-premises) into an organized Cloud system architecture that allows any available mainframe to be easily connected to the cloud space.

Last year, Docker officially announced its support for IBM Mainframes. So ZOS machines are now part of the Docker ecosystem. The advantages of container technology (swift application deployment and agility) can thus be availed with Z OS. Using Docker containers, an organization can deploy a specific app on any platform - say, a mainframe, or public or private cloud, or x86 on-premises server.

A digital age heaven for huge transactions

Be it claims in the insurance or healthcare, call records in telecom, or processing applications in banking, credit card retail or airlines, the Z14 has just the right capabilities for efficient success

With its pervasive encryption, the Z14 is the most secure platform available to totally downsize the risks and financial damages due to any data breaches. It is an ‘anytime’, ‘any scale’ security blanket for the complete system — database, applications, data at rest, data in flight, APIs, etc. A platform with such end-to-end protection has so much to offer for business enterprises constrained by stringent regulatory and compliance requirements (such as GDPR, EU-US Privacy shield agreement, HIPAA, FDIC specified banking regulations, etc.).

Personalized services for the millennial cohort

The IBM Z generates transaction data and customer activity data that is important for building accurate predictive models. Additionally, it supports open data analytics, agile machine learning solutions and AI frameworks (Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and languages like Scala and Python) to enable banks and financial institutions to transition from product-centered strategies to customer experience focused business execution models. Effectively, the IBM Z eliminates the challenge of extraction and movement of data for analysis and insights.

The new Z14 is designed to execute transactions, data analytics, machine learning and AI-driven innovations in parallell without adversely affecting individual performances. Its sophisticated self-learning feature allows analysis of core data at source system with the same power, speed and scale of mainframes, while avoiding the challenges, cost and security risk of moving this critical and confidential information. 

Result? Accurate behavioral models the provide meaningful insights into customer requirements. Highly individualized customer services and experiences that the banker, retailer, insurer and telecom service provider can delight their end users with. All with minimum security risks and at optimized costs.

And now, Z blockchain technology

Blockchain substantially improves transaction network systems to operate more efficiently and seamlessly. Better and more secure software solutions enable recording transfer of assets and financial transactions at reduced cost and risk. Blockchain establishes rules over its network of computers, and ensures consistency and accuracy of the ledger by running sophisticated algorithms. When a transaction happens - for e.g. a sale or purchase - the rules provide for updating of the ledger data (information is first validated with all the nodes in the network, and turned into new blocks that are bound to form the chain), and revalidated with every block in the chain.

With its built-in encryption, digital signatures and hardware (container technology), the Z 14 makes record tampering close to impossible (accelerators make it possible for large numbers of blocks be encrypted at great speed).

Thus, when information age business enterprises host blockchain on mainframes, the Z systems’ processing power, security, encryption and reliability will flawlessly integrate transactional data and applications. This provides tremendous advantage in areas like core banking (accounts processing, consumer and corporate lending, etc.), trading and wealth management, investment banking, capital markets, securities, real estate, supply chain, healthcare, and more.

Extending business functionality through unique user experience

Contemporary financial technology startups are working in the digital area to come up with innovative products and services for specific banking, financial and other business operational needs. By collaborating with these companies, traditional banks and other business enterprises can make use of the best technology available in the current startup and venture capital ecosystem to deliver a new and integrated banking experience while retaining their key functional offerings. When traditional core Mainframe systems are integrated with web based, mobile and other user interfacing front end systems using APIs, we get amazing improvements in agility and business value without any trace of risk to existing operations.

With standard application programming interfaces (say, IBM API Connect), or SOAP, (also using newer technologies such as Eclipse integration, web services and REST/JSON support) business enterprises can create fantastic individualized user experiences from traditional core systems and data, without much of a challenge.

Connectedness for unparalleled processing capabilities

Now, back-end systems can be accessed from the latest digital devices or interfaces in a highly secure manner. The option for mainframe applications to execute from where they are or from a virtualized server space (such as the Cloud) is available too. The IBM z14 offers robust scale to meet the needs of the present day’s modern connected workloads. Z14 mainframe can process around 12 billion encrypted transactions per day on a single system, and is capable of handling a million Docker containers on one platform.

Economical and accommodative pricing

The latest version attempts to provide affordable pricing (container pricing), and open up ZOS for different kinds of workload. The container can be an LPAR, or multiple LPARs or part of an LPAR (as set by customer). There are three formats of container pricing.

Application development and test solution - Customers can almost triple the capacity of their development and testing environments with no additional monthly licensing costs.

New application solution - This permits addition of new and reasonably priced applications without affecting the capacity and cost existing applications.

Payment solution - Designed for payment systems, this pricing is based on the volume of payments processed.

The powerful capabilities of IBM Z provide immense scope to reduce overall IT costs. Business enterprises need to use appropriate systems and platforms for their respective workloads while accepting agile application changes and managing increased demand. A hybrid infrastructure (with public and private cloud – whether hosted, on-premises, or both) could give the best results in utilizing the full potential of mainframe for demanding workloads.