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Empowering Enterprise Organizations to Greatly Reduce
Total Cost of Ownership & Unlock Rapid Innovation   

Mainframe operations and maintenance expenses, i.e., system Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), are the fastest-growing IT expenses for enterprise organizations. Many of these systems house decades of technical debt alongside the organization’s critical data and business rules. Today’s technological advances, including artificial intelligence (AI), disaster recovery, and real-time data analytics, far outpace the capabilities of these increasingly fragile legacy systems, which stifle an organization's ability to innovate and meet customer expectations. In addition, the tight labor force and significant gaps in skills challenge organizations to support these mission-critical systems. IT managed services provider FNTS is launching a new partnership with software modernization services provider TSRI, empowering organizations to embrace their digital future through Mainframe Optimization. 

FNTS and TSRI have decades of mainframe expertise and have helped many organizations move workloads to an environment that achieves greater value from their longstanding IT investments—whether that means staying on the legacy mainframe or moving to a contemporary cloud or hybrid computing environment.

“While the mainframe is a platform of choice for enterprises that rely on computing power and stability, its legacy technology and software requirements are complex and expensive for organizations to maintain without the latest technologies or skilled staffing in place,” said FNTS President Kim Whittaker. “When it comes to Mainframe Optimization at FNTS, no mainframe is too big, no environment is too complex, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. We can support any path to optimization and modernization.”

FNTS and TSRI work together to assess and optimize mainframe environments for the customer’s best outcome, whether that’s simply rehosting or fully modernizing and replatforming the data and workloads simultaneously or in phases. With this strategic roadmap, the FNTS and TSRI team can continuously execute modernization priorities, empowering organizations with the competitive agility to meet end-customer demands and substantially grow their business. 

Rehost through Mainframe-as-a-Service
Organizations can leverage their legacy mainframe with a Mainframe-as-a-Service offering. Like a standard “lift-and-shift migration,” this approach optimizes and migrates current workloads to a cloud-like environment on the mainframe or FNTS’s onsite data centers. Rehosting doesn’t require code changes and ensures existing mainframe data is managed and fully available, making this a feasible option for some applications long-term, or an attractive first step to gain immediate cost savings before a full-scale modernization to cloud. On average, clients can save up to 20% in IT budgets annually using this model. Additional cost efficiency can be achieved through license analysis, software consolidation initiatives, database optimization, and determining which applications and data should remain on the mainframe and which can be retired or moved to the cloud.

Modernize and Refactor Applications
The mainframe applications code, databases, user interfaces, and externals are transformed to 100% functionally equivalent modern solutions and languages, including Java and C# .NET Core. Automated refactoring rules are applied to the code, leveraging modern programming standards and quality scans to achieve maintainable, human-readable, forward-development-ready code. This 99.9X% automated process reduces technical debt, including removing dead and redundant code, consolidating duplicate records, eliminating code smells, and resolving security vulnerabilities. Custom refactoring rules tailored to customers’ unique business needs can also be applied and reused across enterprise-scale IT ecosystems. Converting applications and services to newer, more contemporary code allows organizations to innovate, stay agile, and be competitive while accelerating time to value and often decreasing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 80 – 90%. 

Replatform to a Contemporary Cloud-Native Environment
Converted databases and applications are integrated into a flexible and scalable architecture via containerization that can include any cloud platform, SaaS, or hybrid-cloud model, taking full advantage of each cloud platform’s performance and scalability features, AI frameworks, resilience, and service environments. In addition, the modern ecosystem is enhanced with automated test frameworks, CI/CD pipeline templates, and prioritized customer support, accelerating business-driven development and a path to evergreen modernization.

“Through industry-leading automation and insight, our joint Assessment and Mainframe Optimization solution empowers IT teams with better decision-making, smarter digital transformation, and long-term cost reduction,” said TSRI President Nicolas Newcomb. “We rapidly bring enterprises into modern AI-ready cloud environments, while maintaining their ability to benefit from emerging services across hybrid architectures. As pioneers in AI modeling, we constantly evolve our methods to ensure mission-critical systems are modernized with the highest fidelity outcomes, and the least risk and business disruption in the industry.”

The Time to Optimize is Now
Through Mainframe Optimization and Application Modernization, enterprises can unlock innovation, agility, and long-term operational savings through rehosting and/or end-to-end application and database modernization. By consolidating software, decommissioning hardware, where appropriate, and transitioning more IT costs to an operating expense model, organizations stand not only to avoid risk and save on capital expenditures, but also to gain control and flexibility over their critical IT infrastructure.    

Learn more about Mainframe Optimization at www.fnts.com/mainframe/mainframe-modernization.

A Premier IT Innovation Event 

The Gartner Application Innovation & Business Solutions Summit (AIBSS) is an event hosted for enterprise leaders and IT teams. Analysts and sponsors showcase solutions and presentations tailored to every level, from C-suite to Engineer. This year's theme, "New Intelligence, New Value, New Skills," encapsulates this time of technological disruption, advancement, and expectation.

TSRI embodies this theme in many ways, but with a few important caveats. With legacy application modernization, you keep what's good from the existing business intelligence, add to the existing value by readying the system for innovation in modern languages, and enable companies to bring on new IT skills while retaining the skills of the SMEs through documentation and strategic operational change management. You end up clearing away the debt, enabling innovation, and future-proofing your organizational IT.

TSRI Presents: Modernizing Legacy Tech for the Cloud Era with Automation

The TSRI team showcased these capabilities with a speaking session on the Exhibit Showcase Theater stage. Scott K Pickett, TSRI's Vice President of Service and Product Delivery, delivered a compelling presentation titled "Modernizing Legacy Tech for the Cloud Era with Automation." The session was very well attended, with decision-makers from every industry represented at the event, showing how organizations in every industry are fighting this battle.

Scott presented strategies for transforming outdated systems into modern cloud-native, on-prem, and hybrid solutions, often achieving an 80-90% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for applications. Showcasing TSRI's proprietary formal methods, rules-driven and model-based solution, JANUS Studio®, he shared how we leverage the structure of rules-based AI to document, transform, assess, and refactor software applications. Scott also discussed the importance of early and ongoing testing and shared methods for automating tests, environment setup, and integration. He promoted many hybrid and step-wise solutions to plan and ensure a graceful migration strategy with the lowest risk. The packed room was collectively nodding their heads.

Key Themes from the Summit

As sponsors, we were also eager to learn while there. Here are some themes from the event presentations that stood out.

Evolving Modernization Drivers: Traditional motivations for modernization, such as TCO reduction, limited agility, aging infrastructure, and security, remain prevalent. However, as this innovative time in tech gains momentum, cutting-edge technologies (including many types of AI), enhanced user experiences, and privacy and security compliance are gaining importance for businesses and public sector servants trying to best serve their customers and constituents in this fast-paced and unpredictable world.

That said, these emerging technologies and requirements can be painful or seemingly impossible to implement for many enterprise-level and foundational organizations with massive and aging IT systems. These organizations cannot turn on a dime anymore simply because they have decades of millions and billions of people and organizations' data at stake in deeply rooted systems and also mature and unique business rules to manage their operations. To organizations holding that responsibility, holding steady can seem like the most essential thing in the world until it becomes a real problem. Stakeholders in these legacy systems are increasingly looking for solutions to adapt, catch up, and reframe these technical debts into contemporary IT programs. 

These evolving needs are driving many organizations to prioritize their modernization investments. Partnering with seasoned modernization experts is crucial for achieving the best outcomes. 

Understanding Applications: One of the main themes we heard from both presentations and our conversations at the booth is how many participants work for organizations that struggle to understand their applications well enough to maintain them and decide what to modernize, replace, rewrite, or retire.

Joseph Prikhodko, Business Development Manager at TSRI, described his conversations at the booth this way, "A lot of potential customers just need to know what is in their code and how it interacts with different external components. Documenting the code is crucial for them, so when new developers come in, they don't have to spend months training to learn these old and complex systems. The engineers and developers familiar with these legacy technologies are retired and difficult to replace."

Strategic Modernization Planning: Some analysts presented on strategic modernization planning, which is a critical element of TSRI's successful approach. We know that aligning IT strategies with executive and business goals is essential for organizations to recognize modernization as a feasible path to unlock higher customer satisfaction and business growth. Our comprehensive transformation planning workshops guide customers through strategic modernization planning at the beginning of a project, including defining goals and prioritizing needs across stakeholders. We start with an in-depth documentation and assessment phase to understand and evaluate the business and mission-critical systems, their internal mainframe connections, and external dependencies. 

Customer-Centric Planning: We also work with customers to identify and meet compliance requirements (such as a hybrid solution when the data needs to remain on-premise or by removing security vulnerabilities through automated refactoring.) We take in customer feedback throughout the assessment, and from there we help develop a step-wise deployment roadmap, outlining plans for cloud, hybrid, and on-prem architectures and deployment strategies. Effective data migration planning is essential, as is defining an executable plan for rigorous testing throughout the project to ensure quality and reliability and to prove success early on. We also consult on post-transformation change management, pulling from 3 decades of successful modernization projects in production. The process culminates in a graceful go-live, minimizing business disruptions and ensuring smooth operational transitions.

AI-Powered Growth and Innovation: Many companies are navigating the Hype Cycle™ (as defined by Gartner) as they look to adopt AI technologies, often experiencing excitement and disillusionment. The reality is that AI technologies are best leveraged as complementary tools to augment human capabilities rather than replace human work, and the trends in business AI adoption are reflecting that as more companies work to define responsible usage and governance appropriate to their industry. Artificial intelligence excels in automation, pattern recognition, simple decision-making, and logic-driven creativity. In contrast, human intelligence's complex decision-making and innovation pull from practical experience, empathy, intuition, experimental creativity, and healthy skepticism. The synergy of AI and human expertise can drive optimal results, enhancing productivity while fostering trust and transparency. For organizations with legacy systems, AI adoption can be challenging; the good news is modernizing mainframe applications to the cloud and hybrid architectures can quickly unlock the power of AI!

Many Thanks to Gartner:

Industry conferences, summits, and events are vital for growth, disruption, and sharing of innovative ideas. They offer access to cutting-edge research, industry trends, strategic business connections, and invaluable discussions with industry experts. Gartner excels in providing an exceptional event experience. The Gartner Application Innovation & Business Solutions Summit was an excellent success for TSRI this year. With engaging attendees, insightful sessions, and a dynamic exhibition floor, the event provided invaluable opportunities to network, learn, and showcase our cutting-edge modernization solutions.

At our booth and presentation, we interacted with participants from nearly every industry. A few sectors stood out, in particular: the government and U.S. public sector, as well as the finance, banking, and insurance sectors. These and other industries are grappling with understanding their decades-old technical debt and assessing which options are suitable for modernizing their application ecosystems. We were thrilled to offer them realistic and reliable solutions for documentation, assessment, and comprehensive modernization services, turning many of these discussions into promising opportunities.

Before the conference day was over, Gartner hosted a networking reception. Our booth featured a throwback game night with a retro Atari® video game console, drawing crowds and sparking engaging conversations about our modernization capabilities. To highlight the fun in modernization, lucky winners walked away with a digital Atari console and a LEGO® Atari set—great examples of transforming legacy products for a new era.

Modernize Now!

Ready to take your legacy systems into the future and achieve unparalleled efficiency and innovation? Contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to learn how TSRI can transform your business with our advanced modernization solution. Don't wait—unlock your organization's potential with automation and expert guidance.

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