The Common Argument
We are all concerned about the growing skill shortage in the mainframe space, in fact it’s a fairly pervasive problem across the heritage system space in general, be it Mainframe, IBMi, Unix, VMS, VAX, Multivalue/Pick.
In addition to the technical skills shortage, we have technical push back from new millennial-aged employees who simply refuse to work with a system where they can’t touch the screen or point and click. Explaining that the application has been built over many years and therefore not all the processes are linear and in turn the information architecture isn’t intuitive doesn’t seem to quell their complaints.
This is then further compounded by the eruption of the “idea economy” and a desire from business units to rapidly produce apps that will engage or drive new lines of business. Traditional methods of development that have gone hand in glove with the ultra-reliable workhorse machines that often underpin our key business processes are not particularly agile.
[easy-tweet tweet=”It would appear that we have a machine that is somehow no longer fit for purpose” hashtags=”cloud, tech”]
So it would appear that we have a machine that is somehow no longer fit for purpose, there is a decreasing number of people who can develop on it, there are a growing number of people who don’t want to use it and it doesn’t support rapid application development and certainly not Agile development.
Pulling Back Wool from the Eyes
This is very much a common misconception built up around a set of machinery that sits quietly in the background and supports our very modern economy. These are the machines that we trust to run our banks, our healthcare system, our high street retailers, our government and defence. The average person interacts with a mainframe computer between 8 to 10 times a day, they check their bank statement, they buy their groceries, they pay their bills.
It is fair to say that without ever having met the machine in the back room I pretty much trust it with my life. From an IT perspective we have used these systems because they are the most robust and resilient pieces of machinery, in addition they can handle the high transactional workloads that other systems struggle with.
So it seems to do the job really well, what if I told you that in about 15 minutes you could securely access every application on your Mainframe from any device at all, without installing any software on it or doing any development work, that you could use a touchscreen, you could use a mouse, you could integrate seamlessly with modern tools like office 365?
What if I told you your entire workforce could build modern responsive mobile/web apps that connect directly to your core data, that they wouldn’t need any development skills at all because they can use No Code tools to do it. What if I told you could build 300 Web Services in a week to enable an entire SOA or IOT strategy. All of a sudden our perception of the machine in the back room starts to change.
The Flynet Vision – Enable, Enhance and Evolve
Essentially the Flynet solution is targeted in 3 areas Enable, Enhance, Evolve. All founded on a route principle that the Flynet solutions deliver 100 percent pure responsive HTML to any web browser on any device without client-side software or plug-ins. Essentially our tool set enables Host/Legacy systems to participate securely in Mobile, IoT, Big Data and Cloud initiatives very quickly with little cost and no risk.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Your entire workforce could build modern responsive web apps that connect directly to your core data?” hashtags=”tech, cloud, mainframe”]
Enable – Flynet Viewer TE (Terminal Emulation – that connects to Mainframe, iSeries, pSeries, UNIX, VMS, VAX and MultiValue systems)
Replace bulky desktop terminal emulation clients with a fully featured Terminal Emulator that is delivered to any browser on any device (desktop, thin client, Mobile or Tablet) without any client side software or plug ins. This unlocks how organisations can work with their host system and in addition allows them to use banking level security in doing so.
Enhance – Flynet Viewer Studio UX (Host/Legacy system modernisation tool)
A Wizard based No Code Platform (API extendable) for modernising green screen interfaces, giving Host/Legacy systems a more contemporary look and feel and making them accessible via any browser on any device. We have blue chip client examples where we have trained in-house non-technical personal to modernise enterprise-wide interfaces in a 20th of the time that our closest competitor quotes for the same work using high-cost consultants.
Evolve – Flynet Viewer Studio WS (No Code application that creates W3C compliant Web Services to both Host/Legacy screen based and dB housed data)
Studio WS allows developers and non-developers to create standards compliant, fully robust, annotated, testable and deployable web services to backend data and processes in minutes. Enabling you to create a whole catalogue of Web Services to Host/Heritage (and other) systems in days not months. Completely unlocking Host and Legacy systems to participate in SOA strategies and IoT initiatives.
Christian Rule is the Director of Business Transformation at Flynet Ltd.
Christian has over 20 years in the IT industry, the last 13 years at Director level for various fortune 500 and SME companies. Christian has worked in a number of verticals including Publishing, Finance, Manufacturing, Security and latterly the Software Industry.
Christian has a great deal of experience in the delivery of global enterprise IT projects using various technologies and is a regularly consulted and quoted thought leader in the area of legacy system modernization and migration.