Alan Clark, Open Mainframe Project Governing Board Member and Director for Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE, gave a keynote address titled, “Mainframe Modernization can Transform your Business” at Open Mainframe Summit, hosted on September 21-22 in Philadelphia, PA and virtually. Watch the video or read the recap below.
Alan has worked in OSS for a long time, and he notes that one thing that COVID-19 has taught us is we can work and interact remotely. In fact, we can do many things remotely. This has caused an exciting shift.
Problems Can Also Be Solutions
Businesses are realizing they can do things they didn’t know were possible before. For instance, they’re becoming more distributed.
We also have higher expectations for things to be realtime: one-time and on-demand. Since we have complex expectations, we need a complex and distributed architecture. It also needs to scale and operate seamlessly. Otherwise, it’s hard to maintain.
These expectations also mean that we have to modernize our apps. And we must do this without disrupting them.
And of course, we also need to be sure we’re running trusted and secure code. We’re dealing with a global skills shortage, too.
Innovate Anywhere
SUSE’s mission is to help with these problems by empowering you to innovate anywhere.
They offer:
- Flexible platforms that work at every level of your business
- Ease of use that mitigates risk, closes staffing gaps, and shortens cycles.
- Robust security for your entire platform
You’re shifting to new paradigms with cloud-native principles. But you need to do this by unifying hardware and software, not throwing old tech away. Many orgs are migrating to a hybrid cloud. Mainframe Modernization is able to help with that across many environments.
SUSE is also seeing many adopt cloud-native platforms, using containers and Kubernetes. What they’re finding is that 95% of workloads will be cloud-native. SUSE offers a cloud-native system to help with that migration.
It is noted that 84% of companies will utilize edge technologies in the next 24 months. SUSE has optimized their edge footprint to address this. It allows you to deploy directly to edge devices. So, you use the same services and models across the entire enterprise.
This shift needs to be secure. A good example is the Kubernetes network abstraction. It’s powerful, but it’s also impossible for standard monitoring tools to secure.
You can access Alan’s PPT presentation here. Watch more keynotes and sessions from Open Mainframe Summit on the Open Mainframe Project’s Youtube Channel. Click here to see the playlist.
