NTT Data, IBM Team On Mainframe Cloud For Banks

The mainframe has found another role, thanks to Japan's IT services giant NTT Data which has decided to build a hybrid cloud service based on the IBM LinuxONE platform.

The service is called SimpliZCloud, and for now will only be offered to financial services players in India.

NTT Data envisions that it will be useful for workloads found in core banking applications, lending and risk management applications, and allow consolidation of compute resources and budgets.

"As enterprises consolidate their workloads, they will be able to reduce their datacenter footprint, driving higher sustainability," NTT Data asserted, trumpeting performance that will beat x86 servers – "especially" when it comes to enterprise software license costs and running AI/ML apps.

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Conventional wisdom suggests that mainframes remain a pricey but potent option for certain applications.

Analyst firm Gartner in April opined that "organizations that own a mainframe periodically question the future of the platform because it is perceived as outdated, difficult to manage and costly compared with alternatives such as client/server and public cloud computing."

The firm added that IBM's ongoing success selling mainframes owes plenty to the machines' features – but also fear about "the cost, complexity and risk of migrating off of it."

(For the record, IBM claims roughly 70 percent of the entire world's transactions by value run through its mainframes, and its most recent model has posted record sales.)

Either way, NTT Data clearly thinks the machines are relevant to India's financial services industry. The services company has even worked with analyst firm International Data Corp (IDC) to write a report in which it – maybe by happenstance – came to the same conclusion.

"IDC's research has found that organizations expect to lean upon their mainframe applications more in the future as key engines to power enterprise operations, customer intimacy, and innovation," wrote [PDF] IDC's Peter Marston.

This resurgence is at least partly a product of the AI/ML boom, according to NTT Data India CEO Avinash Joshi.

"Critical business applications, especially those infused with AI and ML, will now have the infrastructure to support performance far ahead of the traditional x86 architectures all in a fully managed, as-a-service model," explained Joshi.

NTT Data and IBM have not discussed the specs of the cloud, or if they intend to take it to other nations – which would seem eminently possible given both tech giants are global, as is the banking industry. We've asked and if a substantial reply materializes we'll let you know. ®