What industry or area of business can compete with technology developed in the 1970s?
Mainframe technology was a decisive factor in the automation of business processes at the end of the last century, especially in the financial sector. IBM dominated the market with an iron fist until it almost monopolised it. However, this competitive advantage has now become a serious problem because it is a barrier to innovation and the adoption of new technologies by companies.
IBM would have to make disruptive changes to its mainframe platform to keep up with the evolution of the big digital players. Such changes would mean that millions of programmes, which were written more than 20 years ago and which form the basis of the most important business processes in banking, would no longer work. As a result, we will be left with a niche platform that is increasingly out of step with the standards and best practices of the industry.
How to eliminate the mainframe platform while protecting the most valuable assets (COBOL code and data)?
The story behind driver8
driver8 was created by engineers working on BBVA’s digital transformation project. In early 2015, the team moved away from the traditional development approach based on IBM mainframe technology and implemented a new cloud infrastructure and next-generation architecture for developing new applications.
However, the large number of applications that were written in COBOL and implemented critical processes continued to be a problem. It was not feasible in the medium to long term to redesign and rewrite them on the new platform.
driver8 was created to solve this problem by reusing the infrastructure and cloud architectures to deploy IBM mainframe COBOL programs.
With driver8, legacy COBOL transactions behave as microservices. They are able to communicate transparently with the rest of the microservices, regardless of the programming language used.
For more background on why we created driver8, read the IBM Mainframe: Migrating to an open architecture on the driver8 blog.