London, 30 May 2017 – LzLabs today announced that leading Swiss telecommunications and IT service provider Swisscom is planning the re-hosting of its legacy applications on the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe®. Using the solution, Swisscom will run existing mainframe applications on more cost-efficient Linux servers, without changes to its application program code.
The re-hosting requires no recompilation of COBOL or PL/I application programs as LzLabs supports existing mainframe operational environments and programming languages. As a result, Swisscom will reduce the high recurring costs of its mainframe software and hardware licensing, while retaining the value of its extensive investment in old software applications, data and business processes.
Operating as part of Swisscom’s core IT infrastructure, The Software Defined Mainframe® runs as a virtual system within Swisscom data centres in Switzerland, using standard x86 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. By moving to the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe®, Swisscom is using its mainframe as a converged / engineered solution (computing, storage, databases and other IT infrastructure functions) for enterprise applications such as online and batch processing.
“The Software Defined Mainframe® gives our customers the flexibility companies expect from their enterprise applications” said Thilo Rockmann, Chairman of LzLabs. “In this way, we are helping Swisscom to continue using its legacy applications in a more cost-effective environment – without the need for elaborate redesign and costly rewriting of applications. This means our customers no longer have to spend their IT budgets on the extremely cost-intensive architecture environments they’ve experienced up to this point.”
“We have had a good experience with our mainframe applications in the past,” says Markus Tschumper, Swisscom’s Head of General IT Services. “However, because of the high cost of operating the mainframe applications, we decided to use LzLabs’ solution. The migration of the applications requires a low level of effort so that they can continue to run on the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe®.”
