The financial sector is sitting on a hidden powder keg and that is ancient technology for banks and insurance companies.
Mainframe modernization is no longer just an IT upgrade.
It is an urgent survival strategy.
So joining us live here at the New York Stock Exchange to break it down.
Is Chad Jones, chief revenue officer at a stadia in A Doc's company, as well as Paul Holland, who is CTO for A Docs, gentlemen, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Great to be here.
So we know that modernization is key in this day and age.
So tell us about the opportunity here.
Yeah, so you still have lots of banks and insurance companies that are running mission critical applications and workloads on legacy technology.
These are applications that were written in some cases 40 and 50 years ago, and the opportunity is to modernize those applications and in many cases migrate them to the cloud to be able to take.
Advantage of AI and everything that's, you know, new and modern today.
Yes, and Paul, I do want to bring you in on this conversation as well.
So Chad just mentioned the opportunities, but in recent memory there have been many companies that have faced challenges, especially when we're talking about mergers.
So what can they do?
Yes, it's interesting that for many, many years this has been driven.
Really around the infrastructure component, the mainframe component, it has unique costs and a lot of challenges at the moment around skills.
So when companies are coming together and they've got these old legacy applications, very often.
They don't even really have a good understanding of what those applications are doing.
The level of technical debt that has been built up over the decades is a big challenge when they're starting to consolidate and bring those functions together.
So really now things have shifted away from being an infrastructure issue to really now focusing on those applications.
How can they futureproof and make those applications ready for the business requirements of the next 1015 years, especially in the banks, that's a big issue.
Yes, and speaking of which, I do want to get your take on the impact as well as implications when it comes to security as well as governance, especially for the bottom line.
Yes, security and governance is critical, and that's one of the reasons why mainframes have been a A safe place to run applications for a long time.
It's a very safe platform, though now companies are far more confident in the security and guardrails and trust running workloads distributed in a lot of cases in the cloud.
So that's kind of Bringing that migration full circle, and I think the other, particularly on the governance side, regulatory demands on, on understanding what these applications do and how they can be applied to the business are increasing in the banks all the time, and that's a big challenge and also a source of funding because banks want to spend money to address that issue.
And less than 60 seconds here, so tell us about the retirement cliff.
When it comes to the technology here, yes, so Paul touched on a couple of the really critical business drivers or concerns that banks and insurance companies have when it comes to running applications on the mainframe.
He touched on skills and the skills shortage.
That's what I would kind of define as the retirement cliff, right?
You've got applications that were.
30-40 years ago, the skills still available in the market to be able to support those applications are aging, and it's becoming a real risk for banks and insurance companies.
So that's really driving a lot of the activity and workload modernization off the mainframe.
Well, we will have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining us for this important conversation.
I appreciate your time as well as your perspective.
Thank you.
Thank you.
