Six Five Connected with Diana Blass: Broadcom Leaders Maintain Mainframe’s Relevance

Six Five Connected with Diana Blass: Broadcom Leaders Maintain Mainframe's Relevance

Mainframes are not only here to stay—they’re leading the way!

This powerful tech is not only alive but thriving, powering 74% of the world’s transactional workloads. From banking to shopping, the mainframe is the backbone of our digital world, offering unmatched security, resilience, and performance. 💪

But there’s a catch: with a generation of mainframe experts heading into retirement, the industry needs fresh talent! 👨‍💻👩‍💻

Diana Blass is joined by subject matter experts from various companies including Broadcom, Interskill, The Linux Foundation, and The Futurum Group, for a conversation on how organizations are investing heavily in training and development programs to bridge the skills gap.

Watch this episode of Six Five Connected for more on:

  • Why mainframe skills are in high demand
  • Open-source initiatives and hybrid cloud integrations keeping the technology at the forefront of innovation
  • The evolution of mainframe technology and its importance in today’s digital world
  • Strategies shared by The Futurum Group to foresee industry trends and prepare the mainframe ecosystem for future challenges

Learn more at Broadcom Mainframe.

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Transcript:

Diana Blass: Mainframes, the powerhouse behind the world’s biggest operations. For over 60 years, they’ve processed massive amounts of data with unmatched security and reliability. But wait, aren’t mainframes supposed to be-

Speaker: Dead.

Diana Blass: 1996, that’s when tech expert turned VC, Stewart Alsop, predicted the end of the mainframe, but by 2001, he was eating his words.

Jeff Henry: People would come at this defensively and they’re saying, “Why should we keep our mainframe around?”

Speaker: People thought that they could do what they did on the mainframe out in the cloud.

Diana Blass: As new technology surged forward, the mainframe was forced to modernize a risk becoming obsolete.

Steven Dickens: The Linux Foundation’s collaborative project, that gives a path for people to find this platform, commit code, and get hands-on.

Diana Blass: Today, it powers 74% of the world’s transactional workloads known for unbeatable security, resilience, and rock-solid performance. Despite making up just 8% of total IT spend, the real challenge-

David Bond: Our generation is starting to move onto retirement, so we need another group of people to run the mainframe environment.

Diana Blass: In this episode of Connected, we explore the efforts to bridge this gap, and you might be surprised by what we found out. I’m Diana Blass. Let’s get connected. Meet Joel Deserve. He always knew he wanted to work with computers, but he never imagined his future would be tied to a mainframe.

Joel Deserve: Broadcom sponsored a class for my university. I went to Tennessee State University and they held a class for COBOL, which was the first introduction I ever got into the mainframe, and they taught me about getting into ISPF and JCL and all these different things that I never knew about. Getting into and figuring out it was sort of this background thing that was running most of the world really got me interested in it more.

Diana Blass: His passion led him to Broadcom’s Mainframe Vitality Program after graduation, an intensive skills development program created to address customers’ challenges and finding job-ready mainframe talent.

David Bond: We place them in a corporate apartment. They work with the customer and during that time, it’s like going to your job. We tell them, “This is your audition to make this customer want to hire you.”

Diana Blass: Broadcom isn’t alone. IBM partners with over 120 colleges and the Department of Labor has launched grants, veteran training and academic programs to fill the gap, efforts that took root when reports in the 2000s highlighted thousands of unfilled mainframe jobs. Meanwhile, cloud technology was on the rise offering flexible, scalable computing.

John Lovett: So we actually realized this problem quite a bit ago in terms of the attrition happening through retirement. And then a shift happened where, number one, IBM built better boxes that had higher capacity and therefore utilization went up even though the number of mainframes had gone down. And in addition to that, there was a ton of development done around open mainframe standards.

Diana Blass: Open standards were a game changer. They introduced a common framework within the mainframe, ensuring interoperability, consistency, and compatibility across vendors and developers. This marked a significant shift for the proprietary software that once dominated the technology.

Jeff Henry: Everything we’ve done in the Open Mainframe Project allows those new developers to utilize the tools they’re used to in that interface, the back end mainframe.

Diana Blass: It began with Zowe, an open source framework introduced in 2018 that helped to pull the mainframe into the modern era.

John Mertic: We’re seeing the innovations in the COBOL space where we’ve taken COBOL from being a technology that’s developed on green screens to one that’s being built in modern development tools like VS Code and IntelliJ, and bringing a whole new generation of folks in using modern techniques like unit testing and things like that. We’re doing it on the Linux side of the house as well with building up new collaborations and new technologies and different ways of bringing people together and also collaborating across the various Linux distributions to help support the mainframe itself and help support open source on the mainframe. And we’re also starting to see some interest in the AI space as well.

Diana Blass: No longer silo. The mainframe is now a critical part of hybrid IT, shifting the narrative from mainframe versus the cloud to mainframe and the cloud.

Jeff Henry: So now you actually see the mainframe usage growing again. So people are putting more effort into the mainframe and it’s mostly because those back end transactions continue to go up.

Diana Blass: As more consumers and businesses relied on online platforms for everything from banking to shopping to communication, the volume of transactions soared.

Jeff Henry: That continuously increases the capacity being used on the mainframe, which is good for us, but we also have to be able to show how do we make it easier to access while not limiting those qualities of service.

Diana Blass: It’s proof that work within the mainframe is truly never over, as the industry constantly pushes to innovate, in turn creating new career paths with new opportunities.

David Bond: And when you’re working on a mainframe job, it could be a development, it could be a systems, an operational job, it could be one where you’re working with different automation.

Diana Blass: For that reason, continuous upskilling has become essential.

Darren Surch: Half life of skills used to be years. You could learn COBOL and program the same way on COBOL for years and you wouldn’t have to learn anything else. But these days your skills are good for maybe 12, 18 months.

Diana Blass: Darren Surch is the CEO of Interskill, the provider of specialized online training programs tailored to the unique needs of mainframe professionals. It uses standards benchmarked with IBM and Broadcom digital credentials. The organization delivers over a million hours annually of on-demand learning, speaking to the value of skills-based hiring.

Darren Surch: So people in the program can come and work on the mainframe. People that have good system skills or security skills, they don’t need a four-year degree. If they have the skills that they need, they’ll find good work in the mainframe space and good career prospects.

Diana Blass: And these careers pay well too, typically 10 to 20% higher than other salaries in technology. And as a result, interest is high among job seekers. Just take a look at this study by The Futurum Group, revealing a dynamic landscape where mainframe skills continue to grow and diversify. Inside the report, 65% of university leaders say they’ve seen an uptick in skilled mainframe professionals, and 91% of employers plan to hire for new mainframe roles within the next two years.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, I mean, based on our research, what we found was that it’s no harder to find mainframe talent than it is to find cyber security or AI talent. There’s plenty of resources, whether they’re IBM resources, Broadcom resources, BMC resources, or just learning this stuff on the internet. And at the end, the sort of gold at the end of the rainbow, you’re going to be working for some of the biggest names in tech and have six-figure salaries, not long out of college.

Diana Blass: Big tech names, six-figure salaries and the opportunity to be a part of a close-knit community of skilled mainframers. In fact, many say the best part about working in the mainframe is the people. But don’t just take my word for it. Check out these perspectives shared on a recent episode of The Main Scoop.

James Roesemann: I’m less than a year into my mainframe career, and the thing that attracted me to this industry to begin with is I think the reason why so many businesses stick with the mainframe. It’s reliable. In a world that feels more turbulent than ever, the mainframe feels like a rock of stability. And I know that it’s going to be a dependable platform and a dependable career for many years to come.

Adia Sakura-Lemessy: Ever since my understanding of a mainframe expanded beyond an idea of a big computer that runs your credit card transactions, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was going to be very happy in this space. And I’m looking forward to potentially having quite a long career here, even though I am just at the very beginning, because right now my passion is running very high for this field, and that’s not something I can say about very many things.

Reg Harbeck: You know what I love most about the mainframe is the people in the mainframe, the people who designed and believed that this was possible, the people who founded the culture, the people who gave us cultural things that are still part of who we are and what we do, and the new generation of people who are bringing their own culture, their sensibility, their understanding, their ideas, their innovations and insights to continue to move the mainframe forward.

Diana Blass: So while some are ready to write that mainframe’s obituary, the truth is-

Joel Deserve: Having that experience in your back pocket can take you to a lot of places. And no one here that I’ve seen is keeping that secret.

Diana Blass: So I guess you could say the secret’s out. The mainframe isn’t just surviving, it’s thriving, and this story is far from over. So stay with me and you’ll stay connected. Until next time, I’m Diana Blass.

Author Information

Diana Blass

Diana Blass is a journalist with a background in technology news and analysis. Her work has appeared on Fox Television Stations, The Discovery Channel, CRN, Light Reading, and other Informa-owned media brands. In addition to her work at The Six Five, she manages Diana Blass Productions, where she develops and produces digital documentaries, podcasts, and commercials for media and corporate brands.

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