A recent survey of Fortune 500 companies revealed that 75% of respondents are concerned about having access to the IT talent capable of properly maintaining legacy systems. To make matters worse, 49% indicate they have seen a rapid decline in mainframe-capable skills within the past 12 months.

Organizations whose business-critical systems rely on IDMS and its ecosystem are feeling the squeeze more than most. Rising licensing costs and a decreasing talent pool have exposed many to unbearable risk and burden. As such, it's no surprise that IDMS modernization is a hot topic, and decision-makers are seeking guidance on how to extricate themselves from this legacy conundrum.

Listen to our podcast as our panel of IDMS modernization experts discusses the good, the bad, and the ugly of their many decades of success working with firms around the globe to liberate legacy IDMS. This is one conversation you don’t want to miss.

If you want to reach out to us, you can email Rob here or drop him a message on LinkedIn. Head to oneadvanced.com/mainframe to find out more about what we do.

If you enjoyed this episode then don't forget to rate and review us here - we know it's cliché to ask, but it really does help us out!

ADDITIONAL LINKS

• 2022 Mainframe Modernization Business Barometer Report
• FAQs
• Liberate legacy data whitepaper
• mainframeXchange Official YouTube channel

Rob 0:01

Rob 1:28

I would like to say, before you start, Cindy, that you've been doing this for a while, you are one of the top experts in the space, you helped coauthor an IBM red book on this subject. So, for those of you that are watching if you're wondering if she's someone you should be listening to. The answer is absolutely. Cindy, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself that I haven't already completely blown out of proportion?

Cindy 1:58

Rob

Yeah, so a few, quite a few successful projects under the belt of that tool set to for sure.

Cindy

Quite a few and a lot of them IDMS. So yeah.

Rob

Cindy

No, it was not actually. We had done a lot of work with Y2K with a lot of the divisions that we worked with the agencies that we worked with. And we did a lot of work about Y2K, but this project was off to the side. And it was a customer, very prominent customer who said, we need to get this from IDMs right away. And so, we wrote the tooling to read the schema to do the work and to generate that and it was separate from what we were doing for Y2K. Good question, though.

Rob 3:42

So, speaking of, you know, I mean, IDMS has been around for quite some time. And it still is obviously around it is within the top three ecosystems that are still used today. According to the survey that I was just rambling about a couple of minutes ago. Can you tell us a little bit as an ex-developer? What were the attractive components of IDMS that sort of brought it into the scene, the way it's been brought into the scene? What makes it unique?

Cindy

I think the most important thing back at that time was the fact that Ads Online were there, the opportunity to have an active dictionary where the source code could reside and be kept organized. The language itself, you could write a nice dialogue with the couple screens at a screen with that dialogue and another dialogue and do it all in, you know, 10 minutes, you'd have something on your screen that was working. So, the database itself being a network database had a lot of flexibility for relating fields and records to one another. So, I think it got a lot of traction that way as well. And really, there was no relational technology that was available in a mainframe environment, and everybody was on the mainframes at that point, IDMS was one, there were several others that we work with also a Adabas, Data com, other technologies that were pre relational that were in the process of helping folks turn into relational. So that's part of the conversion too.

Rob

Interesting and you really can't hear IDMS talked about without hearing about the talent scarcity. So, companies are having a really hard time finding people who are willing and experienced enough in IDMS to keep their systems up and running. Can you talk a little bit about what you've seen in the, in the market on that front?

Cindy

Rob

I mean, and we'll talk about this more in a couple minutes. But expertise, hand in hand with you through your modernization really is the determining factor of success. Yes. But we've talked about the talent scarcity. Can you talk a little bit more, you know, when you speak with prospects today? Can you share some of the other major determining factors of their decision to you know, finally modernize that you're seeing?

Cindy

Yes, a lot of them have the talent problem for sure a lot of them have the Oh, holy cow, I just got a preview of my license agreement that's going to come up in six months. And it's a lot. And that money could be well spent on a conversion, not necessarily in that small window. But we need some runway to be sure that everything's converted properly and tested in everything that goes with that. But the money becomes a big deal as well. Plus, the technology these days, if you wanted to say on the mainframe, and you're using DB2, that's awesome, we can take you there, if you want to come off and use SQL Server or Oracle or DB2 to LUW off the mainframe, you can do that as well. But with that migration, and with that work that it's being done, you'll get the ability to actually have more uptime, the ability to have 24-hour uptime, the ability to share that data more easily, most less the developers that come out of college today, no SQL, they can write SQL against the new databases very nicely, but they can't write against that IDMS database. So that's another thing we see the uptime, and the ability to share that data among the applications.

Rob

Yep, we're hearing the same thing on the marketing side of the house. Got to share that data. Got to share. So, when you when you have these initial discussions with folks, when they're trying to come up with a plan, do they tend to know where they want to go and what they want to do? Or are they leaning heavily on you to tell them what, what you think they should do? I know, that's changed over the years. I'm curious, you know, what's the state of things today?

Cindy

Well, today, I think there's a lot of organizations that have a plan. They've been implementing a plan for a long time. And they're marching further down into that plan are they peeled off everything that they could peel off from the IDMS systems that they had rewrote them, manually bought COTS packages, whatever it might be. And what's left is this core mammoth thing in the middle that they're afraid to touch or need to do quickly, and that's where we get an opportunity to do that. Those guys who know where they're going are marching and probably have been marching for quite a while. We also have folks who have done nothing yet who know where they're going because they have the right skill set in house.

We're, we're dot.net people, we want C#, we are going to use this SQL Server database, we're going to the Azure Cloud, that kind of look that you get from those folks. And then we have other folks that say, we don't know anything about IDMS, our last support guy just left last month, whatever it might be, and we have no idea what we're going to do or where to start or what to do with this. So, we get a lot of those also. And we also get just the folks who, who say, I'm open to anything, what can you do for me? And how quickly can you make it happen? Because my tents on fire?

Yeah, which is also a tough situation for those folks to be in. But there's a lot of reasons to do it. And there's a lot of reasons that that folks have been doing it for many years.

Very interesting stuff. And you know, some things change, and some things stay the same. And I think that, you know, when it comes to IDMS, that posture has been pretty much what it is for quite some time. With respect to, you know, we know that we're losing the talent, we know that the prices are going up from a licensing perspective, when folks discuss pain points, that they are experiencing, and when they're thinking about, like, what is it going to be to modernize this? What are some of the common pain points that they come to the table with? And then one might expect in a modernization? And, you know, how do we try and reduce the risk around that.

Cindy

You said the two most important ones are skill set is leaving, or we have none left? It's, almost too late. And then also the cost, the price, how much that costs? When they come to the table to us, and they're concerned about, some of them are concerned about how the integration will work with other applications? How long will it take? Because our resources are strapped? And we don't have a lot of resources to help with this? How many? How much time are our resources going to need to give to this project to get us off IDMS. So, there's a lot of questions around the resources, because everybody has the same situation about that everyone has their normal job, and then off to the side will be helping with this actual conversion and doing some education and getting them geared up to start using the new relational technology, the new languages that they might go to. So, they have pain points around their resources, as well as the money and the fact that they might be missing some resources, tab wise.

Rob

And then, you know, on the money front, there is the conversation of bundling as a strategy to keep them on, on the platform. And I know we run across that quite a bit. Can you talk a little about how we've helped folks? Or how would I guess, how would you advise someone who's in a situation where they feel constrained by bundling?

Cindy

Yes, but the bundling of the products, the Broadcom products is really what you're referring to. So, you'd have IDMS and Ads Online, you have Culprit, maybe you have Easytrieve, IDMS, you have other ways that use IDMS, the Online side with IDMS DC, there's everything's built into IDMS, and all of that is bundled together with a price tag on it. And even if you get rid of the Culprit in the Easytrieve and the things around the edges, if you still have IDMS in the middle, they're not really going to give you a discount because it's the bundle that you're paying for. Same thing if you get rid of IDMS and you don't get rid of the other Broadcom things the ACF 2 and the Culprit, the Easytrieve, the things that are around that if you don't get rid of all of it, then you still get the bill. And it might be the same or bigger than the one you had when you had 20 products on there versus now that you have 12. It probably looks the same. And that's what people are experiencing that it's not going to make any difference. If I get rid of half of what I'm leasing or paying for from Broadcom, is it going to make a difference in the price I must pay? And in most cases, the answer's no. So, you must do all of it. They know what, what's in store for them at Broadcom.

And so, when the process begins, what do you believe, based on your experience, the most sort of viable options for IDMS modernization are? When you sit down with folks, how do you explain this to them?

Basically, depending on what they have, if they have systems that they've been running for 30 years, 40 years, in some cases, they're stable systems, they don't really have too much to them. They're running the business perfectly. They might have made enhancements over the years, but there's nothing wrong with what they have and it's stable. So that environment where everything is running well, is one that you want to either pick up and continue to run? Well, maybe with the new technology with the new platform with, we want to go into something that's more scalable, but give you the same look and feel and composition that you had. Sometimes that can be very beneficial, not having to do any end user retraining, but running my applications in the cloud, that's a beautiful thing. And those are the types of things that we can tend to. When we hear from them, that they want to do modernization. In some cases, they say, well, I don't we this doesn't serve our business anymore, we need to do something completely different. Well, that's not fitting for a conversion. If you wanted to keep the same thing that you had, that's fitting for a conversion, we help folks with off the shelf packaging, you might be getting an ERP package to replace half of this IDMS application set that you have, might be getting SAP or some other technology, bringing in a big bunch or bringing in a little HR system that will take care of what you were doing for timekeeping, whatever it might be. And in those cases, we can help with staging of the IDMS data, at least get it into a relational format so that you can ETL between what you had before looking like relational to the new databases, so we can help there. And in some cases, folks will come to us and say, I'm buying a cots package, but we don't know how to get the data from over there and IDMs and get it over to our new COTS package. So those are things that we talk about also concerns that they have in in, in what it is that they're about to do. So, they can rewrite it, they can use a COTS package, they can completely convert it will pick it up and put it on any platform with any relational database that they choose. So, the options are very much available to them. And we present generally all those options we listen, listen well, and help them plan for their future. They've had that going for 30-40 years, we want to make sure that what they choose today will also go 30 or 40 years into the future, maybe.

Rob

And I think that consulting style approach to things is really what makes this such an attractive offer. You know, a lot of folks, especially developers, or DBAs, come at the problem, okay, let me see if I can find a tool that can help me do this, that or the other. And we've touched it around this through our conversation, but it really is about the experience going through the process, knowing where the bodies are buried, so to speak, and how to get around that stuff that makes this a unique prospect. For folks, can you tell us a little bit about what makes that such an important component of the modernization process, and obviously, of what Advanced is providing?

Cindy

Yes, the Advanced solution is it's mature, it has been around for over 22 years, it could do all the things in the world that you need to be when you're 21. So it does do a lot of that very hard lifting for us, it definitely can read any IDMS schema and generate the DDL for relational technology, and writes all the programs to get the data out of IDMS into a set of sequential files, to load them to the new database technology using that vendors load syntax, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, whatever it might be to populate the new databases that are there. It also does work to convert the application so that they match up with the database and everything looks and feels the same way.

When we look at what our competitors do, they're not really tearing apart what's there and putting it back together as new technology with new features and new databases and capabilities that are there. But instead, maybe taking a piece at a time or a part of it. Where our solutions are, are more global. They consider everything that you could do in Ads Online and everything that you could do Ads A and the security that's built in. And if you're using Scratch and Q and what does that look like and what features you might be using out of its IDMS DC as the services that are there, we make sure all of that is covered in everything that we do. So, there are a lot of challenges that we've overcome over all these years for all the unique things that customers can do. These days, we're getting a lot of customers who have logical record facility. And we did some conversions of logical record facility back when we first got started with automated tools back in the early 2000s. But haven't done any since then. But now almost everybody has at least some. So, this is another hurdle for us to be able to jump over again. Yes, and with multiple customers. So that's also unique. So, for speed and accuracy. Our conversion is very, very speedy, and it's very accurate and what it does, it preserves the integrity of the IDMS data in whatever database it's going to, and it provides the exact same functionality, regardless of what platform it ends up running on. So, it's rather unique that way.

Rob

Yeah, and it has quite the track record for very, very impressive. And you know, when you and I hate to keep shilling, this barometer report that we're going to be publishing and in a couple of months, but when you look at the data that's come from these, you know, giant global corporations, at the very top of the list in their experiences, we didn't have the right people in the right seats, when we started making choices. We didn't know what we were getting into. And that's what made things complicated. After we did our first modernization of, you know, some sub application or some small database as a part of, you know, a broader set of databases, whatever it is, after they did that, they learned what they knew what they didn't know. And it was, it was a lot easier for them. And I think, you know, for folks who have joined this discussion today, I'm sure there's more than one, that this is their very first time going down this road. What would your advice be for the for the first time, modernization, folks? How, what can how can they avoid some of those pitfalls, that that these prospects have talked about?

New folks looking at modernization have a reason that they're doing it, they have a timeline in their head somewhere, there are people that are a part of their organization that may or may not know about the existing technology. And I think that the initial discussion with any of us at Advanced is going to be around what do you guys need? What do you guys want? What do you what can you keep going forward? And what do you want not to want to have going forward? How should it look? So, it is very consultative.

Yes, one of those to be able to talk to a customer team, even their technical technology teams, their executive teams, to understand what they plan for their business going forward. And what their stomach is for stopping and doing a conversion, getting on the new technology and then carrying forward with whatever enhancements they want to make, and anything that they want to go do after they get off IDMS, for instance. So, there's a lot of things that can happen there. And we have some customers who have half of their applications, they might have 100 applications on their mainframe, half of them would be best suited if they could get into the cloud if they could make some of those outward facing to their clients, their customers, their agencies they work with, and other applications that are kind of behind the scenes or background processing. So depending on what they're looking at what they have left on the mainframe, we look at it a lot of different ways with them, show them what the tools look like how it looks, what the code looks like when it's converted, when it comes from the process, and try to get a level of comfort, so that they understand what the process what the project would look like. And then also understand what they'll get from it technically, database wise and code wise, we go down that path a lot.

Rob

That is a good path for sure. And if you if you were to put yourself in their shoes, as they are qualifying vendors to assist them in doing this or you know, consultants or, you know, systems integrators, whoever it is, or hopefully us, what's the one question that you would advise them to ask, is there any silver bullet question or questions when it comes to qualifying the vendor? For modernization?

Cindy

I think that the most important one, especially in the case of IDMS, is what is your level of experience within your organization on IDMS. Because the first time that you come across a 32k page that has bit level code in it, the normal guy would just break. So, there are organizations that that claim that they're going to be able to do something, but when they tripped over the hard things for the unique things that these customers did over the last 30-40 years.

And you don't have qualified people on your team, it's going to fall. In our case, oh my goodness, I have probably seen almost everything that you could possibly see though I'm sure that there's a lot of unique things that are still out there that we haven't seen yet. Again, we have six solid DBAs who are also relational DBAs. We have former IDMS, Ads Online people. Everybody who's involved in a project around IDMS has IDMS experience. So, it becomes a very important part of the project. Other vendors may say, oh, you have a great tool, and they can generate the code. Well, that's nice. But we're a little bit special. We have this unique thing that we did are we have to interface all these applications to something else. And that's where the people come in along with a mature tool. So, the resources that we put on a project and tooling that we have in place to do the actual work? Are the two things together that if I was someone looking to do a modernization project, I would want to make sure both of those were in place.

Rob

Yep. Absolutely. And let's assume just for the sake of this conversation, you know, someone comes forward with a project that that has all the bells and whistles at a high level, what does the project feel like kind of from start to finish for that customer? What can they expect, again, at a high level?

Cindy

There are three phases that we do early on the first phase is the assessment. And this is the process of collecting all the customer source code that might be remotely related to anything in that IDMS set of applications in that portfolio. So, we collect everything from the dictionaries from partitioned data sets that have COBOL, code, and JCL. On products, we collect the schema reports, the sub schema reports, we collect everything that's related to IDMS, bring it all in, it goes into a SQL Server database, that's beneath the covers of our tooling. And it's broken down into lots of levels of granularity, where we can see it all we can see what to use what's not used, we can see all the details of everything with the applications, we break them out by application, and we see how they also cross reference with each other and how they use data. The second and third phases are really our phase two a and two b the database conversion, once we understand and know what schemas are being converted, or what portions of schemas are being converted, starts right away. As soon as that assessment process kind of isolates the basic scope. At that point, we are generating the new DDL, the extract programs that pull the data out of IDMS, that all goes into the customer environment, their team will do some compilations of those extract programs, and their team will run them and move the data over to the new environment so that that data never needs to leave the customer environment.

So, it's all safe behind their firewall, whether they're going from the mainframe to a Linux environment to Windows or staying on the mainframe. While database conversion has gone on because there'll be some things that they'll have to look at. mostly related to data cleansing IDMS, was very forgiving, you could put spaces into a numeric field, IDMS didn't really care, you could also initialize a field to low values and only fill out one of the levels, one of the fields underneath that group level that you just initialized. And IDMS didn't care but, but any relational technology that you go to is highly class. So, you would have to make sure that those are taken care of our process identifies all those places, we help you with what you can do to resolve that, in some cases, our programs that are extracting the data can fix it for you, too, while data conversion is going on. And there'll be a little tail on that as the customer teams work through any of those cleansing issues. But then we also start the application conversion.

And it's really based on a plan that was put in place as part of the assessment. One of the glories of that assessment process is that we get to see everything that's there, we get to see how it fits together to help make a set of decisions regarding how best to test it, what order you would be doing work, whether you want to have one, one go live, whether you want to have multiple go lives, all that comes into place, then during the application conversion, we're actually delivering code based upon what that plan was in the assessment. So those three phases are our biggest phases. They're all automated, highly automated using the tools that we have, and then it moves into testing.

So, the testing phase will do pre delivery testing, just to make sure the application standing up that we've built whatever we need to build that it's talking to the database for both batch and online, and that everything's ready to roll then we deliver that to the customer environment where they then begin doing their functional testing and their system level testing, integration. And everything that goes with that. We support everybody throughout that whole process that testing lifecycle is probably it is the longest phase in anything that we do, we're going to deliver code to you quickly. It just depends on how fast you can test it. But that testing phase will go on if there's anything that that happens that isn't exactly as you expect it to be the same answer as you got an IDMS it comes back to us so there'd be a ticket open. And then we would redeliver to you that portion of the code that had that same possible issue in it. So, if it was supposed to turn pink and blinking and it didn't turn pink, but it blinked though we'd find every place where that was going on and we would deliver only the code then that was related to that. So that testing cycle, were supportive through the whole process to take you right into the actual deployment which we can help you with that planning. We also offer post implementation support so we can hang out with you for the first three days after you go live or, or for the first three weeks, or the first three months, whatever you'd like to have. The process is tried and true regardless of what language and database you're coming from and what you're going to. Our steps are the same tried and true process.

Rob 30.50

It is. It is. And thank you for the detail, because I think that is important to understand when you're thinking about making a commitment for something like this. As you've been talking, I've been watching some questions come in and so I've got a few that I'd like to throw out and see if see if we can.

Rob

Now, how does your solution handle the DB keys and the other traversal options in IDMS?

Cindy

Basically, the relational technologies that now is DB keys. They use like duties as an identity column. The other SQL Server Oracle use sequence numbers. I believe that's what they are. They're all maintained by the database, and we allow the database to continue to maintain those. So, if in your Ads Online code or your items code, you're saying accept DB key from employee currency and you're saving that number and later going after that record type inside items using that number. Instead, going forward, we'll be using whatever the identity column is or the sequence number inside of that row, inside of the relational table and saving that off for you in the same way. So, we handle everything that's around the DB key processing and make sure that it all still works the same way, and you have the same capability to go quickly back to that exact occurrence of that row in the table or that record in the database.

Rob 31.53

Excellent, excellent. And there's a bunch of questions here. So, and I know we've kind of gone long, so let me grab one more here. What about phased migrations that require bridges? Is that something that you do? And I think you touched on this a little bit already.

Cindy 32.11

We identify those bridges who call who between the applications and files that are being created that disappear, that nobody appears to be using. They could either be backups or they're going out to another site somewhere. The bridging we identify where it is, and we recommend ways that it could be worked. But what we find in most cases is customers find ways to not have to do the bridging, which is very interesting also. You might say, well, you know what? It's these three applications. I'm not going to write 25 bridge programs. Let's take them all three at the same time, and off they go that way. So that happens quite often. We have tried to work in some cases with some of the tools that are out there for replication, and we have some customers who are very interested in that. We've also discussed the option in our IDMS solution to be like our IMS solution, where we can do duplication as opposed to replication. So, at the same time they're updating their old IDMS database. Let's go ahead and update the new DB2 database, for instance. In that case, those databases are going to stay in sync with one another old applications that haven't moved yet. Can you still use the items in the ones that have moved will be pointed to DB2. That's the situation when you're on the mainframe. So, there are some options that we offer there and some experience we've had with it. And there's also always something new coming out and in the marketplace that we look at also for technology that might help in these areas.

Rob

It is always changing, even though it seems like everything in the mainframe world stays the same. That's right.

So, everyone, thank you so much. The Q&A period is over, so you can, if you do have additional questions interim into the chat will catch up with you after that this recording. And you can also go back to our website modernsystems.oneadvance.com and look at a recording of this session. Cindy, I want to thank you. Really appreciate your time and your expertise and the depth of answers that you gave to us. Hopefully it helps everyone understand a little bit more about what they're up against and hopefully they'll give us a shot to talk about it.