TechChannel announced the honorees of its 2024 IBM Z Rising Stars recognition that highlights emerging talent in the IT ecosystem. This year’s list includes Uladzislau Kalesnikau and Aliaksandr Shautsou of IBA Group. The young mainframe experts are acknowledged for their innovative work in advancing IBM Z technologies.

Mainframe Modernization at IBA Group

Uladzislau Kalesnikau, a team lead at IBA Group, is committed to modernizing mainframe technology. As the lead developer of Zowe plugins for IntelliJ IDEA, Kalesnikau makes it easier for young developers and newcomers to engage with the mainframe environment. With four years in mainframe development, he made an outstanding contribution to integrating modern tools into the mainframe environment. Kalesnikau also plays an active role in the global mainframe community, promoting Zowe plugins and DevOps practices.

Aliaksandr Shautsou is a middle software engineer at IBA Group’s mainframe development team. He has contributed to Zowe initiatives that empower developers to work in modern integrated development environments like IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code.

The Zowe Explorer plugin for IntelliJ IDEA developed by IBA Group is now officially part of Zowe’s Long Term Support (LTS) V3 Release. This plugin allows developers to work seamlessly with the z/OS platform directly within IntelliJ IDEA, advancing mainframe development with modern tools.

For over 30 years, IBA Group has been committed to modernizing the mainframe environment by continuously investing in innovation and attracting new talent. The company’s approach to mainframe revitalization led to the creation of Global Repository for Mainframe Developers (GRMD) and several DevOps solutions.

In 2020, a team of young IBA Group developers introduced the For Mainframe plugin that replaces traditional green and black screens with a modern, user-friendly interface. The solution was well received by the SHARE community, prompting Broadcom to invite the team to join the Zowe project.

The IBA Group Zowe IntelliJ Squad continues to actively contribute to the Zowe ecosystem, focusing on building an end-to-end Zowe DevOps framework that integrates modern tools across all stages of mainframe application development.

GOAL

Update the client’s legacy OS/2 banking application and offer new solutions to broaden the customer base, diversify loans range, enhance the performance, and introduce new features to attract new customers. The project also aimed to digitize and accelerate the loan evaluation and approval process.

BACKGROUND

The bank’s Credit Department relied on a legacy OS/2 banking application running on the mainframe to collect and maintain vital information about clients, loans, credit scores, mortgages, and other important data. However, the bank’s outdated IT infrastructure became hard to manage, and upgrading the mainframe application was getting increasingly difficult. This was causing the bank to lose customers and market share.

CHALLENGES

• The bank’s legacy application was inflexible and could not adapt to the rapidly changing business environment.
• The bank’s application could not integrate fully into the rest of the business environment due to the complexity of the mainframe, putting the application data and functionality into a silo.
• The application took too long to perform basic functions, leading to increasing customer dissatisfaction and loss. A customer had to wait for 2-3 days to get response from the bank.
• None of the application’s processes were fully automated, causing delays, errors, and development bottlenecks.
• The bank’s internal IT teams were not able to complete the project due to bigger problems in their business, infrastructure, and legacy processes.
• The waterfall approach became a bottleneck for innovation, slowing down the software development process and limiting flexibility in response to changing requirements.

KEY OBJECTIVES

• Improve the application’s performance and extend its feature set
• Modernize the client’s mainframe as a whole to meet a full range of business requirements
• Minimize risks during the transition
• Integrate the application with the rest of the business environment to eliminate data silos
• Create APIs that enable users to retrieve information through a web-based user interface
• Relieve the burden on internal IT teams
• Automate manual processes to reduce delays and errors

SOLUTION

The bank decided to keep the mainframe but take a new, modernized approach to managing it and developing applications faster and more efficiently.

The bank collaborated with IBA Group’s mainframe teams to help solve the challenges. IBA Group worked to untangle the complex patchwork of different solutions within the mainframe. They introduced new problem-solving strategies and approaches, including Agile methodologies, to help the bank’s internal IT teams break away from old school ways of doing things.

IBA Group also used their rare skills in the COBOL programming language to fix and extend the application. They automated many of the manual processes that had been causing delays and errors, which freed up the internal IT teams to focus on other tasks. IBA Group also integrated the application more fully into the bank’s wider business environment, reducing its siloed status.

RESULTS

By partnering with IBA Group, the bank was able to modernize the application and  entire mainframe system, develop new features and capabilities, unload the support burden off their internal IT teams, and deliver measurable ROI including:

• Increasing the number of loans issued each day by 140%
• Accelerating loan approvals from 3-4 banking days to just a few seconds
• Reducing the time to onboard a new employee by 3 times

Retaining all features of the legacy application, the new solution provided enhanced functionality and was fully integrated into the customer’s corporate landscape.

The new system reduced manual data entry, automated repetitive activities, and minimized the number of delays and errors, which significantly increased the efficiency of the Bank’s Credit Department.

The new application was highly scalable and with improved performance and stability, supporting more than 3,000 concurrent users.

Employees of the Credit Department were able to get access to credit scoring in real time. This happened because all related applications and databases were integrated by API.

Overall, improved functionality and new features of the application helped the bank expand their client base and provide a wider range of loans, along with faster and more efficient loan evaluations and approvals.

TECHNOLOGY STACK

Programming languages: PLI, COBOL, and specially developed procedure language which automatically generates source code in Cobol for user screens

Messaging: IBM MQ

Scheduling: TWS (former OPC)

Databases: VSAM and lately added DB2 databases

Transactioning: CICS

Background

The client’s product is a financial system that manages accounts receivable functions and assures correct accounting procedures. Installed in a centralized location with online access to individual branches, the app meets corporate and country-level business control requirements to ensure that billings and payments are recorded properly.

Challenges and Solution Highlights

#1

The first big challenge for the IBA Group  team was the consolidation of the Asia-Pacific South region’s branch with the main one. The APS system was supported by a team of six people, the mainframe experts supporting a similar application for the Asia Pacific South region.

The resource manager together with SME experts from IBA Group’s side closed all staffing requests, including hiring, adoption, education, and knowledge transfer, enlarging the team by three people. After nine months of work, the consolidation was successfully completed.

#2

The second task for IBA Group was to support the dispute management system. The challenge was to provide L3 and L2 support for a new application that was previously supported by another team.

After a few months of training, the client transferred support of this system to the IBA Group, closing all staffing requests and enlarging the team by three people.

#3

The third well-known challenge, and one faced by companies around the world, was the pandemic. Everybody had to move from the office to remote work and the customer was concerned whether the team would be able to ensure the same level of service working from home as from the office.

At that time, IBA Group was responsible for supporting applications and developing fixes and new requirements set by the business. The IBA Group managed to do it by introducing additional meetings, Slack communication, and organized teamwork — actually improving quality.

From Outstaffing to Service – Benefits

1. A technical and business-oriented team that could work remotely with the delivery, resource, and iteration managers who participated in all stages of the software development and delivery cycle. This included discovery, development, UT/UAT/E2E testing, and deployment, providing stable production support without SLA breakage and ensuring business continuity
2. A customer application portfolio that is supported by one team in one location, providing more flexibility and confidence
3. Education, hiring, adoption, knowledge transfer, and replacement activities have been moved from the customer to the service provider
4. Staff turnover reduced from 20% to 10%
5. Communication channels for operational activities in Slack, separate channels for large projects, and email TaskID continue to be monitored 24/7 by IBA Group specialists
6. Stable development and production support for the accounts receivable system and dispute management systems in EMEA, APS, LA, and Canada. Daily on-call support without SLA breakage, ensuring business continuity.

Other Changes Brought about by IBA Group

When the team started to feel confident in providing stable L3 and L2 support to the customer, IBA Group offered to introduce the role of First Line Leader for the project and that of Scrum Master to follow the Agile methodology with two-week iterations.

IBA Group professionals created a support knowledge base for the project, organized existing documentation, and recorded numerous videos for project newcomers. Our project experts acted as mentors for newcomers to provide stable and fast knowledge transfer.

IBA Group introduced much closer collaboration between the IBA Group team and the business team (UK) to synergize our business and technical knowledge, resulting in a deeper and faster discovery phase for business requirements. This greatly reduced the likelihood of coming back from development to the discovery phase to introduce missing details. Using this collaboration approach, our team became more business-oriented.

After these steps, the IBA Group experts proposed to the customer that they run and own the process of education, hiring, adoption, and knowledge transfer for new resources for the project. For this matter, IBA Group organized courses to hire new talents and educate them on all the needed disciplines and technologies. This way, IBA Group achieved higher satisfaction of the client and their end users.

IBA Group is pleased to announce our participation in SHARE Kansas City 2024. Visit our booth and join our sessions to explore the latest advancements in mainframe technology, open-source projects, and CI/CD practices.

Session Highlights

Mainframe Testing with VS Code and IntelliJ IDEA

Date: Mon, Aug 5, 2024 | Time: 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM

Understand how automated testing integrates into the DevOps pipeline with Galasa, Zowe, VS Code, and IntelliJ.

Continuous End-to-End Testing

Date: Tue, Aug 6, 2024 | Time: 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM

Learn how to incorporate testing into your CI/CD pipeline using open-source tools.

Zowe v3: What to Expect

Date: Wed, Aug 7, 2024 | Time: 8:45 AM – 9:45 AM

Preview the new features of Zowe v3 and provide your feedback.

Zowe and Galasa Together

Date: Thu, Aug 8, 2024 | Time: 8:45 AM – 9:45 AM

Discover how Zowe and Galasa integrate seamlessly.

What’s New

• Presentations on mainframe testing tools featuring Galasa, Zowe, VSCode, and IntelliJ.
• Introduction of the new Zowe Cobol Plugin with autocompletion and highlighting functionality, designed for enhanced compatibility.
• Information on the upcoming Zowe v3 release in September 2024, with opportunities for feedback.

Visit Our Booth

Visit the IBA Group booth #217 for live demonstrations, expert insights, and detailed information about our mainframe solutions. We look forward to engaging with attendees and discussing how our technologies can support their goals.

We look forward to seeing you at SHARE Kansas City 2024!

Author: Andrew Dvirnyk

For many of us in the business of providing and working with technology solutions, mainframes are the old standbys that we love to hate. Sometimes, mainframes feel like the dinosaurs the next generation of developers and engineers joke that they are. But in truth, with the right solutions, mainframes can run smarter and more efficiently.

But it is not all about cheering the virtues of the mainframes that some still see as a necessary evil in our day-to-day operations. Let’s take a moment to look at how, with the right tools, we can resolve mainframe issues and free up time for our engineers, programmers, and technology managers, to get back to the reasons we all do this work.

Once we solve the common mainframe issues that slow us down, by implementing DevOps, we are able to return to the business of being creative and innovative. We can explore how automation opens up new avenues. And we can do more, better, faster, all while knowing that we no longer need to worry about mainframe issues that threaten to stop us in our tracks and keep us from running our operations smoothly.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is flexible. It taps into the scalability, flexibility, and agility that we most often associate with cloud computing and open source development solutions. With DevOps, therefore, we see that we are able to improve efficiencies in real and important ways that matter not only to the business on a large scale, but to the everyday life of everyone who works with the mainframe.

First and foremost, DevOps enables us to meet one of the most common challenges we all face. It helps us to develop software faster. Great, you might be thinking, but I am concerned with how to solve the immediate challenges that I am facing now. While it is interesting to think ahead, you may be saying, I just need to get through my day.

This is an excellent point, and a challenge that we help our clients face. Even though it is part of our ethos as programmers and engineers, to think ahead to future solutions, we are here to help you solve problems now, so we can all free up space to design the future together.

That is why it is time to look at how DevOps makes every day more efficient and more productive. Simply put, DevOps makes it possible to deploy updates faster. And, solving one of the most common issues that threatens productivity (and frustrates us all!), DevOps also makes it possible to dispatch fixes faster.

Better, Stronger, Faster

In many ways, DevOps implementation moves mainframes out of the old idea that they are rigid, slow, and laborious to maintain and manage. The new era DevOps brings all of our cloud knowledge, open source creativity, and automation power, to resolve mainframe issues. DevOps enables us to have more reliable mainframes.

And it makes those mainframes easier to service. At the same time, and this is important for all of us, DevOps also allows us to provide on-demand solutions. One of the chief complaints about mainframes is that they are harbingers of the old era. Now, our technology world is defined by smart solutions that allow us to deploy creative, flexible solutions in near real-time.

These are the kinds of solutions that we can all get excited about. And, taken together, we have found one approach (DevOps) that allows us to be better, faster, and stronger. All the while, we are decreasing costs over time, and increasing efficiencies almost immediately.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the specifics of how DevOps really is stronger, better, and faster. And what that means for your business on the day-to-day, and as you continue to grow.

Move Beyond Manual Operations

We all know (too well) how taxing manual operations can be. In our new world of innovation and efficiency, there is little room for the manual operations that slow us down. And, frankly, bore us, and prevent us from flexing our muscle as developers and engineers.

So, what does DevOps do to help us move beyond manual operations? It frees us up from having to do manual code building to resolve mainframe issues or enable new solutions. It allows for environment setups that make it easier to do what you need, more quickly, and to customize responses, outputs, and solutions.

Further, moving beyond manual operations allows for the installation of a new level of code. All of that, clearly, benefits those of us who work with mainframes day-to-day. It also improves the functionality of the mainframe, and the technology solutions overall. It does this in the immediate, and over time, because of the flexibility that we are now able to access, deploy, and scale. To ensure these kinds of future-forward benefits, DevOps also includes all levels of testing.

Shorten Deployment Cycles

Now, we all understand that if we really want to move into the future, we need to get there faster. We need to start to bring the future to us. That is why one of the chief benefits of DevOps, as we see it, is that is shortens the deployment cycle.

In these cases, we are looking at deployment cycles of one month, or even deployment cycles of one week. That is a major difference from standard expectations without solutions like DevOps.

Improve Control

When it comes to control, we encounter one of the biggest frustrations that we all associate with mainframes. Namely, that, while current sets of programs like SCLMs (Software Configuration and Library Manager) may work, they are not at all integrated with modern technologies.

On the other hand, DevOps solutions focus version control for mainframes that fully integrates with the scope and pace of modern technologies. This means that you can expect more from your mainframe. And it will deliver.

With improved control for mainframes, we see yet another opportunity to increase efficiency, lower costs across the board, and free up time and resources to focus on doing new, better, and more creative work.

Embrace Automation

Whether we are talking about control, troubleshooting, or customization, automation is at the forefront of our minds as we develop and deploy technologies across business platforms. So, of course, when it comes to working with mainframes and providing solutions for improved responses and efficiencies, it is necessary to look at how to bring automation into play. At the same time, that automation must not, for any reason, reduce quality or reliability.

This is where DevOps for mainframes offers additional value. Even with a limited set of automation tools, we know that we are able to deliver more for less cost and in a shorter amount of time. This brings together the overall benefits of DevOps for mainframe, while also introducing automation into a space that has been lacking.

This is where DevOps for mainframes offers additional value. Even with a limited set of automation tools, we know that we are able to deliver more for less cost and in a shorter amount of time. This brings together the overall benefits of DevOps for mainframe, while also introducing automation into a space that has been lacking.

Excite the Next Generation

So, it seems that working with a mainframe does not mean that you are in the dinosaur days, after all. Rather, the mainframes that we all have to deal with have become a new landscape of opportunities for creative solutions that make us able to do our jobs, faster, smarter, and better than we once were able to do.

This is good news for our next generation of programmers, engineers, and technology managers. Let’s face it, it’s not easy to attract talent using the promise of working on mainframes! Now, on the other hand, we have simple, smart, future-forward solutions like DevOps, that changes the game. And this helps us to get the next generation excited about taking on the responsibilities and challenges associated with mainframes.

It assures creative programming and engineering talent that there is a place for new ideas and new projects. And it not only acknowledges, but it embraces the open source mentality that the next generation (and certainly some of us “more experienced” older folks) gets excited about. Ideas about flexibility, innovation, and agility do not have to be separate from work with (and work on) mainframes. In fact, it is just the opposite.

In this new context, we are giving the next generation a newly improved canvas to work with and to put their stamp of creativity on. With DevOps, we are giving them the opportunity to experiment with open source tools on mainframe. It is the best of both worlds. And the future is ripe for innovation that brings better functionality, and better experiences to everyone who uses the systems, and to all our businesses.

What’s Next?

In our next article, we are taking a closer look at DevOps from the inside out. We are going into the what, why, and how of the DevOps value as an agile solution, and a smart addition for your business.

Looking ahead, in our series on DevOps and the New Mainframe, we will be taking you behind the scenes, where we will walk you through everything from APIs to zSystems, and talk about the mainframe DevOps lifecycle and what that means for you.

Finally, we wrap up our series with more on how DevOps helps us at IBA bring to life our mission to Co-create a SMART future. A future that, like IBA, is Sustainable, Multi-faceted, Automated, Reliable, and Trusted.

Author: Yauheni Soupeev

A leading German bank had a problem.

They provided a wide range of financial services to individual, corporate, and institutional clients, as well as to the public sector. They specialized in a wide range of fields, and had grown over the decades to become a leader in their country and field.

Unfortunately, their legacy IT infrastructure’s limitations were catching up to them.

One of their key Mainframe applications was behind the times and nearly impossible to update quickly or easily. They were losing customers and market share, and they needed a solution — fast.

In this two part case study, we will delve into their challenges and explore how collaborating with IBA Group’s mainframe teams helped solve them, resulting in significant benefits.

In part one, we will explore:

• What improvements their key Mainframe application required and why
• What bottlenecks they encountered when they tried to work on this application
• Why their overburdened internal IT teams could not fix these problems alone
• What they looked for in a partner and why they chose IBA Group

A Leading German Bank Struggled to Update Their Key Application

The bank’s Credit Department operated a legacy OS/2 banking application on their Mainframe. They used this application to capture and store information about clients, loans, loan guarantees, credit scores, mortgages, and other mission critical data.

This application was central to the bank’s operational activities, and their Credit Department was looking to extend it. They wanted to improve its functionality and add new features to expand their client base, provide a wider range of loans, and accelerate and digitize new loan evaluations and approvals.

Yet when they tried to develop their application further, they ran into significant barriers. They quickly realized that their application:

• Could not adapt to their rapidly changing business environment. It was inflexible, and took a long time to implement new features, change business rules in the system, or even deploy minor changes to its operations.

• Could not integrate fully into the rest of their business environment due to the complexity of their Mainframe, putting the application data and functionality into a silo.

• Took too long to perform basic functions. Customers who made a loan inquiry had to wait two or three days to get any response from the bank, leading to increasing customer dissatisfaction and loss.

• Created a significant burden on internal IT. None of the application’s processes were fully automated, which meant IT had to perform a lot of manual work to get anything done — causing delays, errors, and development bottlenecks.

The bank’s Credit Department and IT teams knew they needed to solve these issues before they could expand their application’s functionality and improve its performance. However, once they began to attempt to untangle these knots, they realized their issues were more fundamental than they thought — and that they could not resolve them on their own.

The Problems Were Too Big for the Bank’s Internal IT Teams

The bank’s internal IT teams were talented, hardworking, and they wanted to help the Credit Department fix and extend their Mainframe application. Yet, they were not able to complete this project on their own due to a few bigger problems in their business, their infrastructure, and their legacy processes.

Specifically, the bank’s internal IT teams encountered four fundamental issues that prevented them from fixing this application on their own.

First, they were already overwhelmed with routine requests.

They promised the Credit Department — in good faith — that they would fix the application’s problems within one year and deliver the requested features. Yet they had limited capacity and often found themselves in conflicts of interest. They were constantly flooded by other change requests from across the bank’s org chart. These change requests were often prioritized — at the corporate level — above the application’s.

Second, they lacked the necessary skills.

The bank’s IT teams consisted of experienced, proven professionals who were good at their jobs. However, fixing and extending this application required rare skills that were not popular in the world of IT, such as the COBOL programming language. In addition, their skilled developers, who could contribute to this project, were already busy with their daily tasks and had no time for new development, in-depth analysis of the application’s issues, and exploration of new problem solving strategies.

Third, they were stuck in old approaches.

Like many internal IT teams — and especially Mainframe teams — they were locked into old school ways of doing things, in particular the legacy Waterfall approach to application development. This approach became a bottleneck for innovation and prevented them from evolving the application fast enough to meet the changing demands of their constantly shifting business requirements.

Finally, their Mainframe itself was a complex patchwork.

Like many banks, they had developed the Mainframe, its architecture, and its applications in an ad hoc manner over many years. As a result, in order to make any changes to their application they had to navigate a complex patchwork of different solutions. These included:

• Standard IBM technology stack

• Multiple programming languages including PL/I and COBOL

• VSAM and recently added DB2 databases

• IBM MQ as a primary messaging exchanger

• TWS (formerly OPC) as a scheduler

• CICS for transactioning

• And complex custom workflows (i.e. business applications built on CICS and PL/I, including conversational transactions written in a specially developed procedure language that automatically generated source code in COBOL)

In sum: IT was overloaded and understaffed, and their Mainframe was both complicated from an engineering perspective and had multiple technical blockages that prevented it from meeting a full range of business requirements.

Some members of the bank’s internal IT only saw one solution to this problem. They wanted to get rid of their Mainframe entirely and reengineer their systems from scratch using modern technologies.

The Credit Department’s business leaders vetoed this proposal. They had used their Mainframe for decades and appreciated its performance and security.

The business leaders won this debate. The bank decided to keep their Mainframe, but knew they needed to take a new, modernized approach to managing it and developing its applications faster and more efficiently.

They knew they could not do it alone.

Searching for a Solution: How the Bank Partnered with IBA

The clock was ticking. The longer the bank left their Mainframe application as is the more regular customers they lost to competitors, the harder it became to attract new customers, and the lower their market share dropped.

They began to look for an external partner that could reengineer their Credit Department’s application to improve its performance and extend its feature set, modernize their Mainframe as a whole, and relieve the burden on internal IT teams.

To start, they documented what any potential partner needed to help them deliver.

In the short term, they needed to serve their business better, develop quick solutions to complex problems, deliver rapid ROI, offer seamless service improvement to their internal users and customers, and minimize risks during the transition.

In the long term, over the next few years, they needed to reengineer their existing applications, maintain their existing business logic, and integrate their host applications with their remote applications.

The whole time they needed ongoing support from teams that could take care of their business’ daily requests and support tickets, as well as to modify their Mainframe applications and build APIs so users could access them via web UI.

With these requirements defined, the bank began their search, and quickly found IBA Group, a large IT service provider with a specialty in modernizing Mainframes.

The bank was drawn to IBA Group for their Mainframe open source initiatives, which involved the development of DevOps tools in partnership with Zowe, and their showcase of diverse Mainframe modernization solutions at the annual SHARE conference. In addition, the bank was impressed by IBA’s proprietary Appulse platform, which offered automated support for business applications operating on z/OS.

To get to know IBA Group, the bank had a series of screen, compliance, and discovery sessions with the future partner.

During these sessions, IBA Group helped the bank identify their core problems and proposed an optimal solution. IBA’s 30+ years of broad experience in Mainframe, along with their specific emphasis on system and application development, as well as expertise in modifying and migrating Mainframe systems to modern platforms, quickly became apparent to the bank.

The bank selected IBA as their partner, and got to work.

What Happened Next

By partnering with IBA, the bank was able to modernize their application and their entire Mainframe system, develop new features and capabilities, unload the support burden off their internal IT teams, and deliver measurable ROI including:

• Increasing the number of loans issued each day by 140%

• Accelerating loan approvals from 3-4 banking days to just a few seconds

• Reducing the time to onboard a new employee by 3 times

For more details on how the bank and IBA achieved these outcomes, check out part two of our case study.

If you are interested in learning more about how IBA can help you address your Mainframe challenges and attain similar outcomes, reach out to us now for a free consultation.

During our chat, our experts will discuss the current state of your Mainframe, brainstorm opportunities to improve its performance, and walk you through what a partnership between your organization and our teams might look like.