Leaving the Mainframe – Strategy, Hype, or Cost Illusion?

Drivers for leaving the mainframe are frequently structural: perceived vendor lock-in, limited cost transparency, and a missing relationship between platform cost and revenue. At the same time, decisions are often influenced by industry hype instead of workload-specific analysis.

This session focuses on the how: building a practical framework for workload classification, capacity planning, and business cost mapping. We will walk through how to allocate costs to applications, identify real capacity drivers, and connect technical workloads to business services and outcomes. Particular attention is given to understanding workload characteristics such as transaction volume, latency sensitivity, and regulatory requirements.

We will also examine when the mainframe remains the optimal choice—especially for high-volume, reliable transaction processing and regulatory-driven environments—and where distributed architectures introduce additional complexity through data movement, integration, and consistency challenges.