PhilipStorry Ars Scholae Palatinae 19y 998 Subscriptor++

So why aren’t banks jumping at the opportunity to cast off their mainframes and move to the cloud? Risk and conversion cost. As a rule, banks are risk-averse. They are often trailing adopters for new technology and only do so when under competitive or regulatory pressure.

And more importantly, IBM understands this.

Would it be cheaper to run your processes on someone's cloud? Maybe. Will you spend the next two decades tweaking and rewriting as those cloud services get changed or replaced? Definitely.

I'd love to see a proper study into how much a 1990's/2000s Java replacement for an old Mainframe COBOL program has cost so far in terms of redevelopment for later JVMs and other maintenance. Has anyone seen such a thing?

If there's one thing IBM offers it's a kind of platform stability that can be measured in decades. You're not going to worry so much about what works with the latest OS version - this isn't that kind of environment.

Is that a good or a bad thing? We'll see both views in the comments here. But IBM's mainframes are the extreme expression of "If it's working today, it will work for years to come". And for some processes, that stability is very attractive - much more attractive than the costs of constant improvement and the risks it brings.