Is the mainframe still the undisputed king of reliability and security? 🤔
While the cloud and AI may dominate the headlines, the mainframe remains the backbone of the global economy, processing trillions of transactions daily. At the z17 launch, Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman spoke with IBM Z’s Tina Tarquinio, VP of Product IBM Z & LinuxONE and Chris Berry, Distinguished Engineer, about how this new generation is pushing the boundaries of reliability, security, and AI integration!
Key takeaways include:
🔹Built for the Unbreakable: z17 is engineered to handle the most demanding workloads with performance, scale, and security. We’re talking about systems that underpin global finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure.
🔹AI Deeply Integrated: IBM is embedding AI at the core of z17, enabling clients to leverage powerful new capabilities for fraud detection, risk assessment, and real-time insights, taking advantage of the platform’s inherent low latency.
🔹Next-Level Resilience: z17 enhances the mainframe’s legendary reliability with advancements in core recovery and other hardware-level innovations, ensuring near-continuous availability for mission-critical applications.
🔹Modernizing for the Future: IBM is committed to making the mainframe more accessible and user-friendly for a new generation of developers, while also leveraging open technologies to integrate it seamlessly into modern IT environments.
Learn more at IBM.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here on the IBM z17 launch day. Congratulations everybody at IBM and your clients. We are here at the One Madison, IBM’s brand new building here in New York City. It is so new. I’m pretty sure that I smell paint. I don’t know. New carpet smell. Dan.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, you gotta love the energy walking into this place. Been here on investor day, which we’ll talk a little bit about now back here for the Z launch. And Pat, it’s just great to see the kind of transformation that IBM is going through. This launch is a big moment for the company, but it’s really more about the whole company being on this theme, this hybrid cloud and AI theme and just seeing it continue. And that’s probably a lot of the reason, the success. You’ve seen it in the share price, you’ve seen it in the business, you’ve seen it in the growth company’s really been able to continue its path forward under Arvin’s leadership.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it was a great conversation with Z General Manager Ross Mauri.
Daniel Newman: Check it out, link, check that out.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, absolutely. But we’re here for, I would call it the double click on z17. Right. With Chris and Tina. Welcome to the show.
Tina Tarquinio: Thanks for having us. Longtime listener, first time joiner.
Patrick Moorhead: This Is wonderful. I love that you’re hired. No, this is great. We’ve done a lot of conference zoom calls, not zoom calls, I don’t know, video calls together. Going through this is the first time kind of publicly going through this. And I really appreciate all of your time here. So thank you.
Tina Tarquinio: Yeah, we’re really thrilled to be here and thank you for your time. I know you got us early and often on z17 on some feedback and we really appreciated your time and industry expertise there.
Patrick Moorhead: I appreciate you letting me into the inner sanctum when you did. So thank you.
Daniel Newman: Wait, did you know something?
Patrick Moorhead: Possibly.
Daniel Newman: So it was great spending some time. Tina, actually with you, I was here on investor day. One Mad. Great event. It was a great day for the company. I think the market really got a flavor and Z got some real stage time, which I know sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, depending on the cycle. When we did talk to Ross, Tina, we talked about how z16 sort of shifted from everything always being a bit of a cycle, quick spike fall to something that was much more sustained throughout z16. I think 17 looks like it may be setting up the same way. But at the event Rick Lewis got on stage, he really shed some light, bringing this to the forefront to talk us through the kind of IBM mainframe program. And why has this been so successful, so important to the company for so long?
Tina Tarquinio: Well, I think when you look back at the enterprise applications that we’ve really supported, Right. I mean we made a commitment to our clients that they would never have to change their applications to keep running on the mainframe. And we’ve kept that promise for almost 61 years, which is pretty incredible. And I think the clients are
Daniel Newman: Since you were 12.
Tina Tarquinio: I think clients are at the heart of everything we do. So we really employ something called IBM design thinking and it’s, I call it, obsessive behavior around getting our client input. So on z17 we have over 2000 hours of direct user research on the program and that’s really how we decide what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do it, how we’re going to deploy it. And I think when you’re really that obsessive around your client outcomes, that’s what happens. And we’re a full stack program, right. So chip to ship, as I like to say. So Chris will tell you a little bit about the chip, but we own the full stack and there’s really a lot of magic that can happen when you optimize that way.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Isn’t it ironic that that’s kind of the new thing. Right? That started this new thing that started seven or eight years ago. On an industry basis you’ve been doing it forever.
Tina Tarquinio: Yeah. I love when they talk about a platform and it’s kind of been our approach for a long time now. Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: In the industry it’s kind of. I call it the according effect, where it’s like aggregation. There’s disaggregation, there’s aggregation, but we are definitely in a point of aggregation at this point.
Daniel Newman: So there’s like a mainframe version of AI Factory that’s.
Patrick Moorhead: There we go, they’re doing it. They don’t use that term, but it’s.
Daniel Newman: Pretty much you jumping on the bandwagon of what gets all the attention. But I think it’s a nice call out that they were doing this before it was cool.
Patrick Moorhead: No, it is. So let’s do the double click on z17 here. Maybe you can talk about what’s new, what’s been modernized and bonus points for talking about benefits to clients.
Tina Tarquinio: Sure. So I hope everybody will see, but one of our slogans is you can do more at the core. And so when you do more at the core, you’ll have more mips, more capacity, more memory, all that. More at the core.
Patrick Moorhead: Can you explain the core concept to everybody who might not be familiar where that comes from?
Tina Tarquinio: Yeah. So cores sort of have a double meaning. Right. So there’s cores on the processor and so you’ll be able to do more at that core. More AI acceleration. Like I said, more capacity, more memory, more speed, more IO, all that. But at the core of your business, you can really do more. Take advantage of the investment in the mainframe and the technology. To me, when we first started to talk about the messaging more at the core, I was like, yes, that’s absolutely. We want our clients to be able to do more at the core of what matters to them. So we’re going to bring them more AI infrastructure, which is really timely. And it’s pretty incredible that our teams were thinking about this four or five years ago because that’s how long these take to make. We’ll introduce a new PCI attached AI accelerator. We’ll have new capabilities of the on chip acceleration. We’re going to have IO acceleration on the processor and then full stack exploitation around security and generative AI capabilities with our Watsonx platform.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, more at the core. I love that.
Tina Tarquinio: Coming to a T shirt near you maybe one day.
Patrick Moorhead: No, it’s good. I mean, you even hear when CIOs talk about their applications, our core applications. Right, right, those strategic applications. So listen, I’m not a marketing person, but kudos to the marketing people.
Daniel Newman: What?
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, I was mostly product marketing.
Daniel Newman: Oh, come on, come on. You’re a good marketer. You get it. We build products together. Six Five.
Patrick Moorhead: I know.
Daniel Newman: Anyways, but let’s talk a little bit more about your double triple entendre. I’m not sure, but there’s a lot of things we can do with core, let’s just put it that way in this industry. So talk a little bit about optimization of performance and scale. I mean, when we talk to Rossm Chris, he talks about like, you know, 45 billion, I think was the number of transactions or four and a half. Four and a half or four?
Chris Berry: 450 billion.
Daniel Newman: 450, yeah. Transact billion. Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: I see a lot of billion.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
