We're using OpenLegacy to monetize our mainframe assets. I've been doing this for 40-plus years. I was working in diagnostics since CICS and Mainframer. Then I moved to distribution back in the nineties. Everybody has tried to get away from those mainframe applications and assets as much as possible, but the reality is you literally can't. Our bank was bought by this $500 billion bank working with Hogan. I was a Hogan expert back in the eighties and nineties. It's an early-1990s mainframe. Once you're tied up with that kind of stuff, you're not going to easily get off it. I had a boss who always used to say we should be able to get off a mainframe application in two to three weeks. He got fired.

There are many people who will try and get you off a mainframe and say that we can port the data. Of course, you can import the data, but here's what people fail to understand about a mainframe. IMS, CICS-transaction, or shared databases — whether it's by IMS Db2 or even VSAM— have been around for 40 years. So that means that, for all intents and purposes, the mainframe is a big PC with a lot of DLLs. And those DLLs allow you to jump from one application seamlessly to another application.

So over a 40-year period, it's likely that nobody ever built a component-based architecture on a mainframe, or they may have started with a component-based architecture on a mainframe, but you have data sharing through shared data sets where you have program-to-program jumps from one application to another seamlessly. When someone says they can pull an application out, they failed to take into account 15 other applications that have dependencies. 

That's the challenge with a project like this. It's like that Jenga game where you pull stuff out. You need technology that allows you to have a bidirectional call in and call out. You have to look for tooling that is flexible within the constraints that you have for that mainframe in the portfolio. Our project went south, and it was a half a billion-dollar project.

It might be considered to be a hybrid deployment. On the Microsoft service side, we're running an AWS application in our own tenant. But it's still an AWS public cloud. Obviously, there's the kernel and pieces of code that run on the mainframe. And those pieces that are on the mainframe would be on-prem. So I would call it a hybrid deployment.

I am the chief programmer for the largest credit card company in my country, with 4.5 million credit card users. Isracard has a lot of business logic in our IBM 3270s, and it is impossible to use the regular ESB stack. We have to convert the logic into routines, which could potentially take weeks or even months using the Isracard Business Hub.

In some cases, the old mainframe system has been closed and we can’t get inside easily. The programmers said we needed to make a change, so we looked at OpenLegacy. 

We use OpenLegacy to give the 30-year-old legacy data to developers so they can make it available to consumers, including customer data, and the transactions between the customers and our business. End customers want access, via mobile, to details about what they bought, where they bought it, and how much it cost.

Our primary use is handling data and transactions. I'm working for a bank in the end we develop and we deploy banking systems to resolve day-to-day issues with banking data and transactions while adhering to all the necessary regulations.

OpenLegacy is used anytime we need to send data from a modern web application into our iSeries legacy system. At this point, we are still developing the web applications to feed OpenLegacy. 

Our first use case is entering freight data into our legacy system. With OpenLegacy, we will be able to use a modern web form which is easy for our employees at the freight dock to use, and get data into our legacy system.

We are a finance business and this solution is a development platform which has allowed us to create integrations and build solutions quickly. 

We use it to create the Springboard artifacts with logic connectors as well as Plainview Java codes. Once each of the microservices has been created,  Springboard artifacts can be used to create service mesh on the cloud of choice.

We are able to create services very quickly because it is just a matter of having the right talent and a customized version of Eclipse. The latest version of OpenLegacy also has a customized version of Intellij. 

At this point, we don't have OpenLegacy deployed.