MAINFRAME: CORE SYSTEM IN A HYPER CONNECTED WORLD

MAINFRAME: MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER?

CONTEXT

• In today’s hyper connected world consumers have

instant access to and response from their social and

personal networks. Your employees, customers and

partners expect the same speed, interactivity and

personalised services in a professional context.

• Speed / time to market are indeed more crucial than

ever: your organisation needs not only to react quickly to

market changes but also to proactively prepare to the

challenges it is or will soon be facing.

• The cloud era has come; your customers, your

suppliers as well as your competitors have access to a

nearly unlimited pool of IT-tools, services and capacities.

Your organisation has to make sure not to miss the boat

and to fully capitalise on these (cloud) resources to help

make your company future proof.

• Your organisation is undoubtedly challenged to develop

new services or business models to serve existing

and new audiences or to create new revenue streams.

Competitors and newcomers will disrupt your business if

you do not occupy the territory first.

• Security threats and privacy regulations – such as

GDPR - oblige your organisation to assure full protection

of its systems, applications and data.

WHY A MAINFRAME?

• Mainframe technology has hugely advanced in recent

years and – although it never really lost its strategic

position within the ICT landscape – it is back into full

attention as it can offer the fast, reliable, scalable, and

secure environment your organisation needs to function

within the new digital reality.

• Combined with the cloud, the connected mainframe

can process massive data in record time, ensuring

optimal security and instant cognitive analysis capability...

• Contemporary mainframe is open to the new

development environments that will support the digital

transformation of your organisation.

• The mainframe delivers true end-to-end encryption,

nearly endless scalability and the flexibility to come

up to fast changing IT needs and ambitions.

WHY YOUR CEO SHOULD CONSIDER A MAINFRAME

• To capitalise on legacy applications while gradually

modernising them by taking advantage of the

opportunities offered by digital transformation.

• To ensure the continuity of his core business

while being able to leverage the nearly endless

technological possibilities of new development

environments and cloud services.

• To enforce the digital transformation of his business

by making the most of business opportunities that come

along with the new digital reality.

• To save money and avoid the risks of migration or

re-development projects.

WHY YOUR CIO SHOULD CONSIDER A MAINFRAME

• To combine the best of both worlds: the security,

speed and robustness of the mainframe together with

the agility and cost efficiency of the contemporary

development tools and/or cloud environments.

• To recruit and retain the best possible developers.

Modern mainframes no longer rely on COBOL or

PL/I only to operate. They can work with new popular

languages and tools like Java, Node.js, Swift, Python,

among others. The next generation of millennial

developers will indeed love to work with or within the

mainframe.

• To take advantage of the mainframe as a hyper

converged environment offering important gains in

productivity (as well in terms of system performance

as in terms of required human resources), rationalising

maintenance and assuring 24x7 availability.

• To rely on the most secure and protected

environment available on the market as the z-systems

automatically impose full encryption of all incoming and

outgoing data.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR (LEGACY) MAINFRAME APPLICATIONS?Some organisations – mainly inspired by the decreasing availability of mainframe skills and by periodically returning gloomy

predictions in the media on the end of the mainframe – consider replacing their mainframe applications, which after all still is a

costly and risky endeavor, whereas the simplest solution is to modernise on-platform.

You can assure your legacy applications to keep pace with current technological evolutions:

• As the mainframe has become an ‘open’ environment, you

can enrich your mainframe application environment with

Java, Node.js, Swift or other modern technologies.

• You can integrate your mainframe applications with

existing cloud applications or applications in distributed

environments.

• You can link the mainframe to modern mobile and web

interfaces and to IOT or other external devices.

• Moreover, you can fully capitalise on the content of your

mainframe through state of the art analytical tools that

provide access to the reservoir of highly valuable business

information in your mainframe and extract the insights that

can leverage your business functioning.

Capitalize on the best of both worlds: modernise your mainframe application environment and open it up to the world of the cloud

Henri Arnold,

Head of the mainframe center of The NRB Group.

WHY WORK WITH NRB

NRB CAN TAKE CARE OF THE WHOLE LIFECYCLE OF YOUR MAINFRAME AND NON-MAINFRAME APPLICATIONS:• Design, application development, implementation,

running application management.

THE MAINFRAME APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT EXPERTISE OF NRB IS SECTOR AND BUSINESS INDEPENDENT• NRB applies best practices in architecture, development

methodology, project management and application

management.

• The NRB experts can – while mastering these best

practices – be of great added value to any organisation or

company regardless its specific activities.

NRB IS THE #1 MAINFRAME SERVICES PROVIDER IN BELGIUM!

ALMOST 30 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE ON MAINFRAMENRB was created as a shared mainframe infrastructure

and service center back in the 80’s. Since then, NRB has

been providing Bull GCOS 8 mainframe services and its

IBM mainframe capacity has grown from 2.7 MIPS in 1986

on a 4381/2 to more than 23.000 MIPS on a z14 today.

The mainframe service center turned into a leader of its kind.

STATE-OF-THE-ART GEO-RESILIENT DATA CENTERSNRB disposes of an exceptional Tier 3+ infrastructure: two

state-of-the-art geo-resilient data center sites connected with

Dark Fiber. The main site in Herstal near Liege consists of

3 data centers in separate buildings. The secondary site is

located 30 km apart in Villers-le-Bouillet. All devices are fully

redundant with automatic switch-over.

This configuration enables NRB to provide the highest level

of disaster recovery capabilities in Belgium:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) = 0 hour

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) = 2 hours

200 MAINFRAME SPECIALISTSWith more than 200 mainframe specialists NRB is able to

assure fully managed operations as well as application

development and maintenance on the mainframe.

Their expertise relates to IBM mainframe environments as well

as to the Bull mainframe:

• 40 mainframe infrastructure specialists take care of

managed operations at different levels: exploitation,

operations, engineering, service management...

• 160 mainframe applications specialists stand for

application development and maintenance: developers

(COBOL, PL1, Java), application managers, project

managers or quality assurance managers.

This makes NRB the leading mainframe services provider

in Belgium.

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DESIGN

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MAINTAIN

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PLAN

NRB: A COMPLETE MAINFRAME SERVICES PORTFOLIO

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & MAINTENANCE

NRB offers application development and maintenance

services in order to maximise the added value of your

application portfolio at all times.

We of course provide support for classic languages such

as COBOL or PL/I, and maintain your applications using

our proven SDLC methodology and the best available tools.

But our service offering goes far beyond this as we consider

that the mainframe firmly remains one of the major actors of

tomorrow’s IT landscape.

MODERNISATIONNRB conceived a development framework designed to help

you reuse existing applications while expanding towards new

horizons.

• By fragmenting monolithic legacy code into independent

services, we create an ecosystem of API’s that can

be individually called from inside or outside the

z-environment.

• By externalising business rules, we make the code less

likely to need reviewing when the rules change while

improving time-to-market responsiveness.

• By deploying new languages and methods on the

z-system we allow more agile development and reducing

the maintenance costs.

INNOVATIONOur vision of innovation encompasses advanced concepts

such as the deployment of machine learning, IDAA-assisted

real-time analytics, fraud detection, and many more.

THE CONNECTED MAINFRAMEIntegration is now the leading principle. By moving data closer

to their consuming processes we reduce their transport

time and greatly streamline the architecture. By connecting

the mainframe to the outside world we finally achieve total

efficiency.

OPERATIONS

In continuity with the development and maintenance of appli-

cations or as a standalone offering we provide operational

services tailored to your needs.

Our professional staff will ensure state-of-the-art application

deployment, scheduling, and monitoring.

Our multilingual Service Desk- available 24/7 - will route all

your requests to the appropriate team.

INFRASTRUCTURE & HOSTING

We offer a wide range of infrastructure and hosting services

covering the common IaaS and PaaS marketing models.

From hardware resource allocation to database administra-

tion, we will provide you with commodities, support, and the

guidance of highly skilled specialists in each field of applica-

tion.

We continually keep our mutualised mainframe infrastructure

at the latest technological level, allowing you to take advantage

of all improvements brought in by the new hardware.

Capacity management is not our least concern. By providing

you with adaptable resources, we will let you reduce your

operating costs and leverage the exact power you need to

fulfill your critical business requirements.

SEAMLESS MIGRATIONS

Our migration methodology relies on proven best practices

that have passed the test of several major projects for our

customers. Our specialised equipment and virtualisation

methods enable us to realise faultless migrations of DASD

and tapes while limiting the impact on your business, the total

cost and the time required. On average our migration projects

do not last for longer than three months.

THREE SERVICE MODELS OFFERED BY NRB

NRB COUNTS A NUMBER OF THE LARGEST BELGIAN CORPORATE USERS OF MAINFRAME AMONGST ITS CUSTOMERSWe consider our customers as true partners. Our working together is based upon transparency and open mindedness in our

common striving for cost effectiveness, innovation and resilience.

KEY FIGURES NRB MAINFRAME CENTER

1,5 Billion

transactions per year

22.000 active users

at our customers and many more users

at the customers of our customers

23.000 zSeries

MIPS capacity installed

L’UNION F IT LA FORCE

RESPONSIBILITY IAAS PAAS PAAS+ PAAS+++

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT CUSTOMER CUSTOMER CUSTOMER NRB

APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT & OPERATIONS CUSTOMER CUSTOMER NRB NRB

SYSTEM MAINTENANCE & OPERATIONS CUSTOMER NRB NRB NRB

HARDWARE ALLOCATION & MANAGEMENT NRB NRB NRB NRB

www.nrb.be www.linkedin.com/company/nrb

info@nrb.be | +32 (0)4 249 72 11

NRB S.A. / nv Parc Industriel des Hauts-Sarts - 2e Avenue 65 - 4040 Herstal | Rue d’Arlon / Aarlenstraat 53 - 1040 Bruxelles / Brussel

Designed at NRB | 08/08/2019

CONTACT

MAINFRAME@NRB.BE

@daringtocommIT