IBM, CA Broadcom, BMC, Rocket: Mainframe Modernization Strategy

IBM, CA Broadcom, BMC, Rocket: Mainframe Modernization Strategy

Mainframe experts are retiring, but the systems that process 30 billion transactions daily are not going anywhere. The core challenge in enterprise IT is no longer if you can modernize the mainframe, but how. This article dissects the radical M&A moves defining the mainframe software market: Is IBM's strategy of using OpenShift and watsonx to make the mainframe a cloud-native node brilliantly future-proof, or are they burning cash? Is BMC's focus on Compuware DevOps tooling the most practical solution to the skills gap? Or will Broadcom and Rocket simply succeed by controlling the essential legacy tools? The outcome of this war will determine the architecture of the global economy for decades to come.

Every credit card swipe hits a mainframe that decides approve/decline in under 100 milliseconds—including real-time fraud detection.

Mainframes powering your shopping addiction since ’60s

"That 'obsolete' mainframe processes 24 trillion operations per second while your cloud service crashes from a traffic spike."

I eat cloudservers as crisps – Mainframes

IMS: The "Dead" Database That Predicted NoSQL. Everyone jokes about IMS being obsolete, but here's the plot twist: its hierarchical structure is nearly identical to modern document databases like MongoDB. IMS organizes data in tree-like structures with parent-child relationships—exactly like JSON documents. While developers are discovering the benefits of document stores for handling complex, nested data structures, mainframes have been doing this since 1966. IMS was XML and JSON before XML and JSON existed.

IMS: The “Dead” Database That Predicted NoSQL.