Modernization In Place
Protect What Works. Accelerate What’s Next.
Your mainframe and legacy systems are proven, reliable, and secure. But growing workloads and evolving business demands require you to be smart about how you utilize resources to enable growth. You need to innovate, but rip-and-replace migration projects pose too great a risk to your mission-critical applications and data. Luckily, there is an alternative: Modernization in place. Learn about the safer, smarter path to optimizing resources, reclaiming capacity for innovation, and harnessing the full power of your mainframe for future success.
What today’s modernization challenges really look like
- Sustaining high-volume, always-on transaction performance as workloads and service expectations continue to grow
- Creating capacity for new digital, analytics, and AI initiatives while maintaining operational continuity
- Preserving deeply embedded business logic, batch sequencing, and dependencies as modern capabilities are introduced
- Evolving development practices and skills without losing institutional knowledge built over decades
- Keeping pace as peers extend trusted mainframe systems to power AI-driven and hybrid architectures
The Enterprise Strategy Group report takes a deeper look at these modernization challenges—breaking down where traditional approaches fall short and outlining the principles and practical strategies behind modernization in place. It provides a structured, analyst-driven perspective to help guide modernization efforts without unnecessary disruption.
What is modernization in place?
You don’t need to rip-and-replace. Enterprise leaders are modernizing with a low-risk approach – modernization in place. ESG’s six principles show how to protect your core while innovating for the future:
- Keep mission-critical apps running reliably on the mainframe
- Optimize workloads to improve efficiency and reclaim capacity
- Modernize incrementally rather than wholesale to reduce risk
- Extend existing systems with modern capabilities (APIs, DevOps, Cloud, AI)
- Design safe rollbacks to minimize disruption
- Blend mainframe expertise with fresh perspectives from new developers
Your modernization priorities
At Software AG, we help organizations put modernization in place, focusing on the areas that matter most.
Applications
Your Adabas & Natural core applications are proven, reliable, and built on decades of unique business logic. They run at the scale your enterprise depends on, yet business leaders now expect modern interfaces, faster delivery, and digital-first experiences. Modernize in place and preserve the stability of your IBM Z environment while extending APIs, DevOps practices, and cloud connectivity.
Data & analytics
Mainframe and legacy systems hold the information that powers your core business. Make this data available for analytics, AI, cloud platforms, and gain a complete view across the enterprise for faster, smarter decisions, stronger compliance, and the ability to compete with confidence in a digital-first world.
Workloads
COBOL applications on IBM Z continue to run your most critical operations with unmatched reliability and security. As business demands grow, optimizing workload placement becomes essential for maximizing your mainframe investment and laying the groundwork for innovation.
Shift COBOL workloads off the General Processor by compiling COBOL to zIIP-eligible Java bytecode to reclaim capacity for AI, analytics, and new development projects—all without disrupting your trusted applications.