Mainframe business critical and India a vital cog: IBM's Ric Lewis

India plays a crucial role in modernising IBM’s mainframes, which form the backbone of some of the most critical applications in industries such as banking, airlines, retail, and government.

 

While many consider it a legacy technology, and perhaps no longer at the forefront of today's technology conversations, it remains indispensable to innovation in enterprise businesses.

 

According to a recent report from the IBM Institute for Business Value, 43 of the world’s top 50 banks and 8 of the top 10 payment companies rely on mainframes as their core platform. In fact, 70-80% of the world’s transaction data still resides on these systems.

 

IBM is making significant investments in its new mainframe hardware, which is designed to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), according to Ric Lewis, senior vice-president of IBM’s infrastructure business.

 

This unit encompasses not just mainframes but servers, storage, cloud, and technology lifecycle services.

 

“Mainframes are more exciting than ever. The way we approach mainframes involves deep customer involvement in the design process. For instance, with the previous version of the mainframe, our clients highlighted fraud detection as a major issue. The solution we identified was to integrate machine learning and AI techniques. So, we embedded AI processing capabilities into the processor. Today, 250 clients are leveraging that capability,” Lewis told Business Standard.

 

This innovation has made mainframes the fastest-growing segment within IBM's Infrastructure business, demonstrating that even legacy technologies can continue to deliver value. While the infrastructure business had seen negative growth of 4 per cent in recent years, it is now growing at 2 per cent.

 

Where does India fit into all of this? Mainframes remain relevant due to platform modernization, and this is where India’s contribution is pivotal. The India Systems Development Lab (ISDL) is IBM’s largest development hub within its Infrastructure division, supporting projects across IBM’s hardware and software portfolio, including development, testing, product support, design engineering, cloud platforms, and DevOps.

 

Indian engineers have been instrumental in the development of IBM’s Telum II processor, which powers the company’s latest mainframe, the Z17, as well as the Spyre accelerator.

 

“So it is every single business unit and it's across, from everything from core architecture, product management, all the way through ship it and adjust it. We kind of have a thing we always talk about, full mission ownership. That means I do not want you to do a piece of the development pipeline. I want you to own a product, define all of its features and create that product and then support that product when it comes out,” Lewis adds.

 

The Big Blue also believes that customers have realised not all of their operations can be transported to the cloud due to the high cost and security concerns. So they are looking to store a portion of their data on premise.

 

“There will be a few players that are all cloud and there will be a few players that are no cloud, but generally most of the enterprise clients are going to be hybrid. The clients feel secure, not just in the architecture, but because it is on their premises and there is nobody getting at those machines. And it fits well in that hybrid environment,” Lewis added.