In this episode of the I am a Mainframer podcast, Steve Steuart, mainframe modernization lead at Accenture, shares his fascinating journey in the mainframe industry. Starting as a computer operator in Panama during the 1980s, Steve has built a career focused on migration projects and modernization strategies. He reflects on the enduring role of mainframes, stating, “The mainframe got us to the moon; the cloud will take us to Mars.” Steve advocates for a hybrid approach, blending mainframe and cloud technologies to meet evolving business needs. He also dives into the human side of modernization, emphasizing that the biggest challenges often lie in “people and processes,” not just technology.
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Announcer:
This is the I Am a Mainframer podcast, brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project. Episodes explore the careers of mainframe professionals and offer insights into the industry and technology. Now, your host, Steven Dickens.
Steven Dickens:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the I’m a Mainframer podcast. I’m your host Steven Dickens, and today I’m joined by Steve Steuart. I’ve known Steve for a while, you’re going to enjoy this episode. Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve Steuart:
Thank you for having me.
Steven Dickens:
It’s been a while since we’ve kind of had this type of wide ranging conversation. I think the last time was over a beer at AWS, what was that just over a year ago?
Steve Steuart:
I’m about to see you again and re:Invent here shortly.
Steven Dickens:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing how they just come around. So Steve, let’s dive straight in. We’ve worked together in a number of different capacities. Tell listeners and viewers a little bit about your role and what you do for Accenture.
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, so I’m one of the go-to-market leads for mainframe modernization. I’m a mainframe modernization lead. I’ve been doing this for a really long time, just kind of fell into it. I was doing Y2K work looking for cheap LPARs and use SCO Unix with microfocus for testing. And then the customer goes, why don’t you just run it there? And I go, okay. And that was horrible. That was a bad decision. That was in ’93, so I’ve been on teams. It’s done about 200 of these over the years, both on Unisys and IBM.
Steven Dickens:
Fantastic. So you took me there. Great guest already. Steve, you’re helping me out. Let’s go back to the beginning, talk a little bit about the whole purpose of this show is I’m a mainframer and to understand people’s story arc. The fascinating thing for me on this show is I’ve had loads of guests, loads of people like you I know and have worked with and do lots of meetings with, and I didn’t know maybe the last 18 months or the last three years of your history. I don’t know the genesis, so imagine this is a Marvel movie and we get to do the genesis story. Before Steve became the superhero, I know today, go back, give me the coming out of college story.
Steve Steuart:
During college I was a computer operator in the eighties at an Air Force base in Panama where I grew up.
Steven Dickens:
I grew up in Panama. You just blow past that. No, stop. Let’s touch on that. So you grew up in Panama?
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, we’re part of that American enclave in Panama and that ran the canal and whatnot. And so they had a program that allows the US dependents there to work into different librarian, whatever. I got into computer operations, so while I was in high school, I was hanging tapes and playing ring toss with a read-write rings. I don’t know if you ever, maybe I’ve dated myself with that, but they used to have a little ring thing on the tapes that you took it out so you wouldn’t write on it, but that kind of stuff. Decollating six part paper, that was carbon paper on the green bars and then you had to separate them. So I’m dating myself, load up the card decks and the card reader, all types of fun stuff.
Steven Dickens:
So what was that first system, do you remember?
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, it was a Burroughs 3500. It was an older machine that they had down there, and so that’s where I started. I have lots of horror stories about those days.
Steven Dickens:
Maybe that’s one for another podcast when we get you back on. So going forward, you’re in Panama, you’re working tapes, you’re still in high school,
Steve Steuart:
Computer operator. Then I got into programming and then UNIVAC won the Air Force contract and I got put on my first migration, which was from Burroughs to Sperry UNIVAC. Then Sperry and Burroughs merged and created Unisys and then by then I just left. I left the states, finished my career there with Florida State and then went into mainframes.
Steven Dickens:
So you’re straight into mainframe, straight out of college.
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, pretty much been doing that forever. z/OS and IBM and Unisys.
Steven Dickens:
So where was that? Where was your first employer, Steve? Where did you drop?
Steve Steuart:
During college it was actually the Datamax, which is selling green screens. Back in the day when you needed terminals. People couldn’t find terminals fast enough. So I was working doing those terminals, selling those terminals.
Steven Dickens:
Fantastic.
Steve Steuart:
Then I went into 4GL’s when James Martin was running around pedaling his case tools, if you recall, James Martin and the Cool Gen CA Gen and all of Gens came out. And so I was part of X Gen, which generated for Unisys and IBM. And then I came to Astadia, which is the old, I was at Astadia almost 30 years. So I was only one employer for a long time, but that’s where we were doing the Y2K projects and the predecessor of the Astadia was Openware is where I started.
Steven Dickens:
So that’s how you know Scott.
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, I know Scott, that’s family over there. I mean I grew up over there and so it was there almost 30 years.
Steven Dickens:
I had Scott on my podcast.
Steve Steuart:
Wonderful. Yeah, Scott knows me. So we worked together really well, but that’s where I came. I was a CTO of Astadia doing a lot of migration projects and optimization strategies and staff augmentation and things of that nature. And then after that I had an epiphany. I was at the re:Invent and Andy Jassy has a picture of a garage with a 360 and a bunch of mainframes and saying that they’re going to be having a mainframe practice and I threw my hat in the ring for that. I thought that Amazon was going to get into that. I want to be part of it. And so became part of that was the worldwide go to market.
Steven Dickens:
That’s where we met each other and came across each other.
Steven Dickens:
So tell me a little bit about that period. I think a lot of people kind of know of AWS, obviously they’ve interacted with them, they’ve maybe used their services. What was your time at AWS like?
Steve Steuart:
It was very exciting. I mean it’s the world’s largest startup. There’s a lot of fun stuff that they’re doing over there. If you think about it, IBM talks about these are our largest mainframe customers, you look at that list and then you cross reference AWS large customers.
Steven Dickens:
It’s almost a hundred percent overlap I would imagine.
Steve Steuart:
But if you look at all the conversations that AWS was having at that time was, it was hey, let’s move these server workloads, but let’s not touch this over here. But the customer, I’m not saying that the mainframe needs to move to the cloud, but I think I term it mainframe today are going through a Goldilocks period. They’re going to find the right amount of mainframe for their business process. It could be hybrid.
Steven Dickens:
I’m of exactly the same opinion. People always try and frame my passion for the mainframe as I don’t have passion for something else. And this phrase I heard a couple of years ago, now I keep using, you can hold two truths to be true at the same time.
Steve Steuart:
Correct.
Steven Dickens:
So the analogy I use is that workloads are like journeys. You’ve probably heard me say this. Workloads are like journeys. The fact that I do a journey in a car more frequently than I do a journey on the train doesn’t mean that the car is the right vehicle for me to get to New York on Tuesday. I literally just booked an Amtrak ticket about an hour ago, but I’ll drive to the Amtrak station and then catch an Amtrak, then jump in an Uber to get to my meeting. So I’ll do arguably an owned vehicle, a single tenant, multi sort of workload vehicle, and then I’ll get in a short term rental of a single person vehicle to do the last mile. You can do exactly the same when it comes to workload placement, the fact that your workload suits a car, great. That doesn’t invalidate that other types of commutes should be used for different types of journeys.
Steve Steuart:
You can process on a mainframe, consume it on the cloud, you can move applications over, you can do a SaaS model. It just depends on what your business, I use the eye exam analogy. When people ask me what’s the best pattern, Steve? Well the best patterns, the one that suits your business, one or two. One or two. You ask the questions and then the Optometrist is going to get you your prescription. It’s the same thing when you do an assessment of a business as to do you want to invest, do you want to grow, what do you want to do? And that will determine the pattern or patterns for your business. It’s just like an eye exam, but you got to go through those questions. What are your business drivers? What do you want to do? Do you have issues or challenges that you see? What are they, how do you mitigate those? And you end up with the patterns or patterns.
Steven Dickens:
The other analogy that I use, and we get into this and I’ve done lots of COBAL discussions on this podcast. People like COBAL bad, Java good. Python good, Ruby bad. C++ bad, Java good. And you’re like, guys, it doesn’t matter. It’s like saying French is bad and German is good, or German is good and Spanish is bad or English is better than all of them. We don’t have that dialogue around the world. Yes, it would be nice when you’re on a vacation if everything was, there was a sort of universal translate. But we tried that with Esperanto and that never worked for anybody. The fact that COBOL is COBOL and Java is Java, who cares? How you get the skills for it, now that’s a valid concern, but the language itself isn’t bad.
Steve Steuart:
No, it’s not. It’s a very powerful language and it’s really interesting how backward compatible COBOL has been over the years. It’s an amazing thing.
Steven Dickens:
Let’s get back to you. We’re chewing the cud here. Let’s get back to you. So you are at AWS. Just give us an insight into some of the types of projects you’re working on. You probably can’t say names, but just give us some view of some of those projects.
Steve Steuart:
AWS or at Accenture?
Steven Dickens:
AWS and then we’ll go to Accenture.
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, I mean at AWS, the first thing was how do we go to market? How do we earn trust with our customers? I use the analogy as the mainframe to me was the original cloud. I was an operator and I would get this call, hey, provide up the priority for that workload or add more memory to that workload to get it through the process, I did that manually. Well that was things that are available now automatically on the cloud. So basically explaining to them that there are certain workloads that could work over there and we were setting up the global program for go-to-market and earning trust with our customers to do that. What are the partners we want to do? So we had that working with the partner team to come up with all the charter members when they announced the migration service and working with some really talented folks at AWS for that. But setting up the program, and then I went on the road with customers, how to do different things and what works, what doesn’t work. And at the end of the day, in my opinion, what failure, all the scars I have, have been 100% people. It’s not like I couldn’t get a technical thing to work. It’s the passive aggressive person that shows up to help.
Steven Dickens:
It’s the people who process parts rather than the tools parts.
Steve Steuart:
I mean the tools, you can figure out the tools, but the people is number one, and the process is also close to number one. I watched the show The Prophets, so he always talks about people process and product, and that’s a very common thing that I believe. But in this space you got to have the people and the desire and know that this is where we’re going to go. This is the north star and there will be obstacles, but you got to get up, dust yourself and do it. So these are the things that I’ve learned over the years.
Steven Dickens:
I mean it’s interesting, we’re in tech. There’s always a nice shiny object that’s new to look at and people get obsessed with the technology, but I think we have a lot of younger listeners that listen to the show and I think they’ll maybe be listening to the show, thinking about the technology, thinking about the tools, thinking about how do I get skilled, how do I learn? But as I speak to people like you that it comes across this, it’s as much as you say the people around it and the process around it than it is the tools. I mean maybe just for some of those newer listeners, Steve, just give us a view of when you say the challenge is people, what does that actually manifest itself as?
Steve Steuart:
So I have teenagers and so when you ask How was your day? One word, a grunt or one word answer. Some of these people that I’ve dealt with that got assigned to my teams, well tell me about the system and they won’t be as forthcoming as I would want them to be, or they will not share that, or I need to have the sources. Here are all my PDFs, here are all my sources for the last 30 years. No, I need the sources that are in production, not the whole inventory. They would do things like that. And so there’s a psychology to mainframe modernization and that you have to deploy. One is some will prescribe to it, others won’t. But legacy building, you built this, you’ve been maintaining for 30 years, you just want to throw it away? Do you want to pass that over to the next generation no matter what format it’s in and do the branding ABC company or a ABC 2030 or t-shirts, coffee mugs, movie posters that I’ve done in the past where you have the producers be the CIO, the director and the producers of all the people. And those things sound kind of hokey, but they actually do that and over communicate.
Steven Dickens:
People bought into the change.
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, I mean nothing like water cooler talk to kill a project, don’t go in the conference room and then the headline is we’re going to unplug the mainframe, we’re going to lose our jobs. No, we need you. We passed the baton. I mean that’s the kind of thing that we got to, I prescribe to.
Steven Dickens:
I think there’s a lot of sense to that. I mean I had a gentleman on the podcast, the most observant of viewers will know that we’re recording two of these on the same day and I’m wearing the same shirt in both interviews. Then Gary was talking about sort of the people side of this, and it’s fascinating to hear you talk about it because coffee cooler, water cooler talk kills a project, is a phrase I’m now going to steal Steve. So you’ve given me that one. You may see that one in my, but it’s true. It’s true. How do you get people bought in? My brother’s a project manager and hearing him talk about how these projects get rolling and some of the techniques you’re talking about there sound chincy and sort of cliched on the surface, but people come to work and they bring their personalities to work and you’ve got to engage them on that level as well as just on the pure technology.
Steve Steuart:
Right? I mean it’s very important and that’s why I say you got to do team composition is important. You got to figure out who’s on the bus, who’s not going to be on the bus. You got to start identifying those and then the ones that you need on the bus, how long do they have? And do golden handcuffs if you have to. Do a comp plan, do a comp plan for everybody for a successful transition. I’ve done that too with our customers where you do a joint pool of money, we would put some money in the customer, put some money in. That would be split among the team, because our team has to work too with their team. And so it’s very important that team collaboration, that psychology of this whole thing.
Steven Dickens:
So we talked about AWS, you’re obviously now at Accenture. Tell me a little bit about what you’re doing, what your role involves today and how that’s playing out.
Steve Steuart:
So Accenture’s got a lot of focus around the mainframe modernization and I’m part of that group right now working on different types of products. I mean, Accenture’s a massive company. I didn’t really appreciate it until, because I used to compete with Accenture back in the day as well, and then partnered with them, but I didn’t really appreciate just to grasp how big they are and they’re just in so many different areas.
Steven Dickens:
You don’t really contextualize how big these global system integrators are. Hundreds of thousands of employees.
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, it’s just crazy and how you can tap into, what I do love about Accenture is we look at the technical thing, but I have access to not technical people, but industry knowledge. These are the driving factors that are happening in financial services. Like I heard the new one, this ISO 200, 220 or something like that, which is for financial services around payments where you have to do payments. So I’m talking to not a technical guy, he just knows this is policy, this has got to be done by October 25 and anybody at the process a payment does any payment with Swift, there’s a whole new thing that has to happen. So those are the things that I really enjoy because then you can focus on the business drivers and have somebody that can articulate this is the why you have to do it. Not that the mainframe’s bad or anything like that, but we have to figure out where these things artifacts are and how we modify it. Do we modernize it, do we move it? What do you want to do? Those kinds of things.
Steven Dickens:
So at Accenture you’re working on people modernizing on the platform, modernizing with the platform and modernizing to get off the platform or is it all of the above?
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, as you know, I did a little stint at Kyndryl, so I love their perspective of an investor, divestor and that kind of working in the maintainer where they want to coexist. Same scenario. I mean that the customers are going to tell you what they want to do if they want to modernize on we have a group that can do that. If they want us to run and administer the mainframe, Accenture has the capability to do that. You want to deploy hybrid strategies. You can do that with all the cloud providers even on-prem and if you want to move workloads off, you can do that as well. We have the same partners and working with Microsoft and AWS and Google and we all know who the partners are. They have tools to do that and so we have the same type of partnership. So you’re able to pivot different locations, wherever the customer wants to go back to that point, what’s the best pattern for you, the one that suits you?
Steven Dickens:
I love that analogy of is it one or two?
Steve Steuart:
Yeah, that will dictate when you do a workshop, the pattern will bubble up as you ask the questions. It will be very evident.
Steven Dickens:
So as you go and chat to these clients, what are you hearing? Where’s the sentiment at? And I’ll maybe preface it with this. I’m hearing a lot more pragmatism. I’m hearing a lot of people, I just literally wrote some research about repatriation of cloud workloads. I’m seeing multiple truths to be true. I’m seeing public cloud growing at 30 to 45%. I’m also seeing HP, Dell and Lenovo grow their on-premises business. I’m seeing IBM ship more mainframe MIPS late in the cycle of a mainframe than I’ve ever seen them ship. So I think multiple truths can be true at the same time. What are you hearing?
Steve Steuart:
Well one is, AI needs data. A lot of it. It’s hungry and thirsty for data. And so I’m seeing a lot of Db2 transactions being processed when MIPS are going up because the AI team needs that data. I prescribed to, Hey, do a CDC, get the data down closer to the A and run it there. There’s also on the flip side, IBM’s got the AI capability on the mainframe itself.
You could do something around that. I think what I’ve seen, I’ve seen a lot of things when the cloud first came, we’re going to move everything. I mean I saw this pendulum go way out there and there were some failures, not understanding, not appreciating. These young kids think the mainframe is just an old hunk of junk and it’s a very, very sophisticated machine that you need to appreciate what it can do. And so when you don’t appreciate it, that’s where you get into trouble. But I’m seeing the pendulum now coming back and I’m seeing more of a hybrid, right? If you ask any mainframe customer, do you need cloud in your arsenal? Every one of them will say yes. Now the next question is how much? What are you trying to do? And so that’s where I’m seeing more of an increase of hybrid and the increase in MIPS is within the same customer is not like there’s a brand new customer. It’s within the same customer group that they have, but the demand for data is just going through the roof.
Steven Dickens:
So Steve, I could have this conversation with you for hours, but I do have to get to start to wrap things up and bring things home.
Steve Steuart:
No problem.
Steven Dickens:
So couple of questions and I’m really, really interested in your perspective on a couple of these questions, particularly the second one I’ll ask you. But given your sort of career arc, one question I always asked on the show is you get the chance to go back to 21, 22-year-old Steve, and you can ask him a question. What would that question be? What advice would you give to your younger self?
Steve Steuart:
What advice would I give to my younger self? It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay, because I left Panama and so it’s not like you can drive home, right? So I remember when I left home, it’s not like you can drive, I’m going to a completely different country in the US. So I think I’ll tell him it’s going to be okay. Take, don’t be so eager to do something. Sometimes you just got to calm down.
Steven Dickens:
Chill,
Steve Steuart:
Chill. It’s going to be fine.
Steven Dickens:
Yeah, that’s great advice. That’s great advice. So my second question, I asked this of all my guests and I’m really interested in your perspective considering you’ve worked for AWS, you’ve worked on the mainframe and you’ve advised clients. Where do you see this platform five years from now? So not the next box, maybe not the box after that. So where do you see the mainframe landscape?
Steve Steuart:
It’s going to be around way after I’m gone.
Steven Dickens:
Hopefully that’s decades from now
Steve Steuart:
There is a role for it. There is a role for it and each customer’s got to determine what they want that role to be. But I will say, I will say this, the mainframe put us on the moon, but the cloud is going to put us on Mars. So there are some of those things that are happening right now and what we got to do is you have quantum on encryption on the mainframe. You could keep your keys on that mainframe for all your cloud providers and have a high speed access. A lot of things that the mainframe brings to the table. So I don’t see the mainframe going anywhere.
Steven Dickens:
So Steve, you’ve come up, I’ve been recording this podcast now four or five years. The mainframe put us on the moon, but the cloud is going to put us on Mars. What a great way to wrap up. Steve, it’s been great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining me.
Steve Steuart:
Alright, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Steven Dickens:
You’ve been watching another episode of the I’m a Mainframer podcast. I’m your host, Steven Dickens. If you like the show, please share with your friends, click and subscribe and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for listening.
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