Imagine your mainframe as a legendary treasure map. Before setting sail, chart your course! Define your goals—be it slashing costs, boosting efficiency, or fortifying security. A clear vision ensures your CBA adventure is not just thrilling but wildly successful!

Conducting a cost and benefit analysis for a mainframe involves careful consideration of various factors like defining Objectives. Clearly outline the goals of the analysis. Are you looking to justify the continued use of the mainframe, evaluate the potential savings from migration, or assess the cost-effectiveness of alternative solutions.

1. Clearly define your objectives for the analysis, such as cost & benefit, agility, innovation, etc. 2. Determine the scope of the analysis by assessing the current mainframe environment. 3. Identify and quantify all fixed and variable costs associated with the mainframe. 4. Estimate tangible and intangible benefits, both quantitative and qualitative, that the mainframe provides or could provide after changes 6. Compare the costs and benefits of each alternative and calculate key financial metrics like NPV and ROI 7. Document assumptions and risks associated with the mainframe environment. 9. Communicate the results and recommendations effectively and ensure the analysis is clear and concise for stakeholders.

-Define analysis scope and objectives, collect application artifacts details. -Assess monthly MIPS and zIIPS usage, costs, and costs for potential application changes. -Identify benefits like meeting batch deadlines, leveraging expert knowledge, and ease of maintenance. -Highlight drawbacks of staying in mainframe environment like high compute costs, lack of new experts, limited adaptability, and increased licensing fees. -Understand application complexities, perform a 7R analysis like rehosting, refactoring, or rewriting. -Determine target architecture and use tools like the Azure pricing calculator for cost estimates. -Present recommendations emphasizing cost savings, improved customer service speed, and simplified maintenance.

Evaluating your mainframe? #mainframe Get a clear picture with a cost-benefit analysis! Here's a quick guide: 1️⃣ Define goals (cost reduction? performance boost?) 2️⃣ Track current costs (hardware, software, personnel) 3️⃣ Quantify mainframe benefits (reliability, scalability) 4️⃣ Explore alternatives ☁️ (cloud, modernization) 5️⃣ Present impactful results (clear data, business value) Make informed IT decisions & optimize your mainframe! #ITcosts #costeffectiveness #cloudmigration

To assess your current mainframe costs, there are several methods and metrics you can employ: - Contact the IBM IT Economics team for a no-charge assessment of your costs - Costs will be related to Hardware, Software, Staff, Facility, Maintenance, Network, etc. - Identify indirect costs – these can make up 40%-50% of total costs and are often missed when counted as overhead - Review your contracts and agreements with vendors to ensure you are getting the best value - Use methods such as Monthly License Charge (MLC), Sub-Capacity Pricing, and Workload License Charge (WLC) to measure costs - Use tools and techniques such as performance tuning, workload balancing and data compression to optimise your mainframe performance and reduce costs.

What portion of transactions or company business is processed by the mainframe vs the % of the IT budget. The mainframe is easily seen as a big ticket item, but it can be very hard to find the actual cost of disperse systems. There are many studies that can give you where this is for different organizations in your industry. Careful analysis should be taken here, as if you don't measure something, you can't assess the benefits. Also try to measure what 'free compute' is available on the mainframe. This is typically found where you could run more workload at certain times without pushing levers that contribute to cost. Forecasting cost into the future assumes you'll do nothing, so be very aware of this point.

Do not over look the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the system. Managing a handful of mainframes requires a fraction of the effort (and therefore cost) of thousands of 1U servers, especially when having to maintain patches due to security vulnerabilities.

When evaluating mainframe benefits consider the following: - Tangible benefits are those which affect an organisation's bottom line, they are observable and measurable. Examples: Cost savings, Operational efficiency, Reduced downtime, Energy efficiency, Scalability, etc. - Intangible benefits, on the other hand, are more difficult to evaluate as they are often unobservable and cannot be easily quantified. Examples: Reliability and data integrity, Business continuity, Legacy application support, Skilled workforce, Competitive advantage, Vendor support etc. Both tangible and intangible benefits can transform over time from one form to another. Therefore, frequent reevaluation is required when assessing intangible benefits.

Here you start to get into the meat of the analysis. Commonly overlooked are items around: Security: You might 'have to' run on the mainframe as it delivers the highest levels of security and availability. It's just a platform: Today the mainframe can run traditional transactional and batch workloads, but it can also run your distributed linux workloads natively in containers. How could this fit into your strategy? Don't get stuck in what you do today on the mainframe, look forward and test assumptions.

When comparing your mainframe alternatives and scenarios, you can categorize them based on the status quo (maintaining the current mainframe environment) and change (upgrading, migrating, or modernizing the mainframe). Status Quo: 1. Assess current performance 2. Analyze ongoing costs, including hardware, software, labour, and maintenance expenses. 3. Evaluate risks and limitation 4. Consider compatibility and integration 5. Weigh long-term implications Change: 1. Evaluate the potential benefits of improved performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency with newer solutions. 2. Analyze associated costs 3. Assess risks and challenges 4. Consider long-term implications 5. Factor in innovation and agility

When comparing mainframe alternatives, it's important to know what kinds of jobs your mainframe is currently performing. 1. Are most of your jobs reading, writing, or queries? Is this ideal? 2. You also want to have a good idea of the level of latency allowed for the type of workloads being ran. Understanding the above 2 things will help you evaluate if the jobs being ran are a good utilization of your mainframe's power and capabilities. This will help you to understand 3 crucial things: 1. where your mainframe spend is allocated 2. what can be optimized 3. what you would like to change If modernizing the mainframe is a challenge for you, send me a DM, we have some offerings at IBM that can help.

1. Summarize key findings: Present a concise overview of the mainframe cost and benefit analysis results. 2. Use visual aids: Utilize charts, graphs, and other visual representations to illustrate the costs, benefits, etc clearly. 3. Provide clear recommendations: Based on the analysis results, offer well-reasoned and data-driven recommendations for the best course of action regarding the mainframe environment. 4. Address potential concerns: Proactively address stakeholders' concerns or questions. 5. Encourage open dialogue: Foster an open, collaborative environment that encourages stakeholders to share their thoughts, opinions, and feedback on the mainframe analysis results and recommendations.

- When your alternative system will be able to replace mainframe, most of the time it takes too long to be ready to replace mainframe and we have to run both the system in parallel with lot of cost over head along with development coat - How much support cost will be needed, mainframe is usually very stable and very less support staff - How will you have same level of system expert as mainframe folks usually possess decades of experience and know the system very well

This should not be a simple step by step exercise. This process should really be iterative and, dare I say it, agile. So you may do steps 1-3, but then find something in step 4 that needs you to revisit those steps again. This should not really be a one off exercise and should ideally be conducted across the whole of your enterprise.