The hidden cost of COBOL’s success
Your COBOL applications aren’t just running. They’re thriving. Payment processing, inventory management, financial reconciliation—these mission-critical workloads power your enterprise with unmatched reliability. But as your business demands increase and place strain on your mainframe capacity, your mainframe costs begin to increase substantially.
Each new integration, user requirement, innovation and new customer adds processing demands. Your General Processor (GP) usage climbs steadily, MSU consumption balloons, and software licensing fees skyrocket. Suddenly, mainframe cost reduction strategies dominate your IT discussions while innovation takes a back seat. While your strategic initiatives are waiting for budget that’s tied up in keeping current systems stable, competitors are investing in AI, analytics, and customer experience. You need to find a way to free up your budget and resources to focus on what’s next, and fast.
Why migration isn’t the answer
If you are struggling with mainframe capacity management, there is a good chance you have encountered vendors who promise salvation through cloud migration and complete rewrites. There is no shortage of these players in the market. They emphasize that migrating off the mainframe will be a future-proof solution for your business, while downplaying the massive effort, risk, and hidden costs that come with this undertaking.
Let’s be honest about these mainframe modernization promises. Migration projects are major undertakings that have the potential to tie up valuable resources, exceed timelines, and go over budget. You’re not just rewriting code; you’re risking decades of refined business logic. These solutions often come with hidden costs, delays, or dangers of breaking what works perfectly.
That being said, if your workloads are reaching the limits of your GP capacity, something needs to be done. The longer you spend avoiding the problem altogether, the higher your licensing costs will rise. The good news is that you don’t need to jump into a risky, uncertain migration project out of fear. There is another path to cutting costs and setting your mainframe up to sustainably power your core business operations well into the future. This path is in-place modernization.
COBOL batch processing optimization: The real opportunity
As we’ve already established, COBOL might be a challenge, but it is not your problem. The language continues to power critical business transactions globally for one simple reason: it works. What’s costing you is not the code itself, but where these workloads run.
When COBOL batch jobs are executed on your GP, they consume the most expensive compute cycles in your environment. Every job drives MSU consumption. Every MSU increases monthly charges. Even small workload increases can trigger large expense curves that destroy budgets.
The symptoms of poor mainframe workload management include:
- Performance degradation during peak batch processing
- Unplanned hardware capacity upgrades
- Innovation projects perpetually deferred
- Escalating software licensing fees
The power of smarter workload allocation
The solution for effective mainframe cost reduction strategies doesn’t require disruption. You can compile COBOL workloads to zIIP-eligible Jave bytecode and optimize mainframe batch jobs without touching application code.
By implementing zIIP offload for COBOL batch processing optimization, you achieve:
- Immediate capacity relief: Free your General Processor capacity for essential workloads
- Reduced licensing costs: Lower MSUs mean lower IBM mainframe software licensing fees
- Deferred upgrades: Avoid immediate hardware investments
- Zero disruption: Maintain current COBOL operations unchanged
- Maintain the power & reliability of the mainframe: Same machine, same benefits, optimized workload allocation
This mainframe workload offloading approach represents true mainframe modernization— improving efficiency without risk.
Keep your data where it belongs
In-place modernization means your data never leaves the secure, governed environment it’s always lived in. Unlike migration projects that require copying, converting, and transferring data across systems—each step introducing risk of loss, corruption, or compliance exposure—JOPAZ keeps all information exactly where it is. Business rules, data integrity, and audit trails remain intact, ensuring continuous operations while optimization happens behind the scenes. By modernizing in place, you eliminate the hazards of large-scale data movement and preserve the trust, performance, and protection that make the mainframe the most reliable data platform in your enterprise.
Transform capacity management into strategic advantage
Smart mainframe optimization does more than reduce mainframe costs. Every MSU freed through zIIP offload becomes budget for innovation. Consider the possibilities: That AI initiative becomes feasible. Customer experience improvements get funded. Cloud experiments move forward. You’re no longer choosing between reliability and pushing your business forward.
Your mainframe remains your trusted platform, and IBM continues to invest in making it stronger—with every new generation of z/OS enhancing performance, security, and cloud integration. Your COBOL applications continue delivering value, and now your IBM Z optimization strategy works smarter, not just harder.
By shifting COBOL workloads to zIIP-eligible Java bytecode, you modernize in place—without rewriting code—while building on a platform that’s still evolving for the future. The capacity you reclaim and the budget you save can be channeled into new mainframe workloads, innovations, and modernization initiatives that continue to run securely on z/OS.
Ready to reclaim your mainframe without risk?
Your mainframe has powered your success. Your COBOL applications have proven their worth. Now it’s time to make in-place mainframe modernization work for your future.
ソフトウェアAG JOPAZ delivers the mainframe optimization solution that helps you reduce mainframe costs, improve mainframe capacity management, and avoid mainframe migration costs, all while keeping your COBOL applications running exactly where they belong.