LzLabs has announced that leading Swiss telecommunications and IT service provider, Swisscom, has migrated its entire mainframe workload to the cloud, running on LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe. With this migration, Swisscom has achieved a landmark in enterprise IT, by moving its business critical legacy mainframe applications and data to its own enterprise cloud infrastructure, without any data reformatting or recompilation of its application program code.
Swisscom achieved approximately 60% IT cost reduction as a result of its journey to entirely phase out its legacy mainframe, which it has now switched off. The business-critical applications migrated – measured at 2500 installed MIPS (million instructions per second) – manage billing, geography and address information and line administration for the provider’s entire fixed line network. All workload now runs on Swisscom’s own private cloud.
“We turned to LzLabs for two reasons – reducing the high cost of our legacy mainframe, but also a need for greater flexibility in our IT infrastructure that we could not achieve on the mainframe,” said Markus Tschumper, Head of General IT Services at Swisscom. “With applications and data migrated unchanged, SDM represented a lower risk path for us to reach this goal,” he continued. “We even have plans to offer SDM as a service to our own customers via our enterprise cloud, so our customers can experience the same benefits.”
SDM is a specialised container technology that provides capabilities for mainframe applications to execute on open systems, with no requirement for recompilation or conversion of data types. SDM provides a runtime environment that supports the necessary functionally-equivalent subsystem APIs to enable transparent execution of the binary representations of these programs and data. Running in open environments, these applications are more easily integrated with mobile, IoT, cloud and DevOps strategies and no longer require management by a diminishing mainframe workforce.
Swisscom’s successful migration away from its legacy systems is yet another example of the growing demand for flexibility, agility and cost savings from organisations shackled by their existing mainframe environments. LzLabs continues to provide its customers with a graceful path to modernising their mainframe environments incrementally, allowing these organisations to harness the power of modern, open, cloud-based technologies and tap into the worldwide open-source talent pool.
“We are delighted to have helped Swisscom on its pioneering IT modernisation journey from the legacy mainframe to the cloud,” said Thilo Rockmann, Chairman and COO, LzLabs. “We hope the success of this implementation inspires more organisations to take the first step towards open innovation,” he continued.
