Commonwealth Bank, Australia's largest bank and in fact the largest company, has successfully migrated their core banking system off the mainframe onto SAP S/4 Hana on an AWS cloud system. They expect to retire their mainframe in 18 months, and it's now only processing credit card transactions.
If Comm Bank can successfully retire their mainframe, then anyone can do it. The argument for keeping the mainframe has always been it's crucial for high transaction high security environments, but this proves that is not the case.
It's only a matter of time before other FSI companies, and governments, follow the same path.
11 replies (most recent on top)
Companies moving off the mainframe are just plain stupid... But there are stupid people everywhere... so... Good luck!
AWS’s outage this morning proves your point
Outages abound on AWS. Let's see how long they stay there. That and being hacked.
@OP the same bank that's had multiple outages recently??
Mainframe in trouble.
Linux is getting popular on the desktop.
yadda yadda yadda
@OP, the jury is still out on the advantages of adopting the cloud model. Financial institutions require stability and backward compatibility. So. don't count mainframe, AIX on Power as dead.
The post reads that they moved to SAP S/4 Hana on AWS - a packaged software solution that does not require re-coding antiquated Cobol/CICS (legacy) languages to modern languages. Since CBA was already running SAP on the Mainframe, the only work required was to migrate the data to databases running on AWS and then pointing the SAP software to those AWS datasources. This type of SAP-to-SAP-on-cloud migration has been going on at major (and smaller) companies for decades. IBM Consulting has had numerous clients that have done this. I've worked on 2 of these projects and heard of at least 3 others in the past 15 years.
Also this post suggests that the bank expects to retire their mainframe in 18-month - however, there is nothing in the news stories to back this up. Rather, it says that the Migration Project lasted 18 months from early 2024 to Sept 2025). CBA still has Credit Card Transaction Processing running on their Mainframes. While they may be able to scale back their MF footprint, it is not completely going away.
Lots of customers have tried to move off the mainframe and miserably failed. There are even more customers that are just totally afraid of even trying. Good for IBM!
@a3 The first migration is always the hardest because there is always the potential for unknown and unseen "gotchas". But then successive migrations can go smoother than the first, and there will be lessons learned from the first one and each successive migration. There is no gain without some pain.
I'm still waiting to read that Red Hat migrates VMWare VMs without too much effort. Hopefully in this lifetime...
First of all, congratulations to the bank. @a3 does raise a good point but it's more of an IBM article of faith than the real argument. @OP, to maybe dig a bit deeper into @a3's point, do you have details such as: what were they using (DB2, IMS, DFSORT, CICS, ....)?; how much code did they have?; all COBOL?; probably most importantly, how long did the transition take and how big was the team that did it?
A lot of customers would love nothing more than to get off the mainframe. But, of course, they are terrified by @a3's argument. A couple of things might help. Success stories such as Commonwealth Bank. Also, the migration effort is likely to find not so good code that can be made better as part of the migration. They could get better code that runs faster.
"The argument for keeping the mainframe has always been it's crucial for high transaction high security environments"
No, the real argument has always been it costs a fortune to migrate and there's no guarantee the migration will be successful because of the 30+ years of undocumented legacy code accumulated.