In business, the period of inertia is a period in which the client pays for products and services... well which the client has already paid for, but continues to do so in the belief that barriers to change are too high to scale.
Do we experience Inertia in the Mainframe world? Specialist vendors, know (believe) that the Mainframe and their embedded services are irreplaceable. Mainframes, the reliable workhorse of enterprise computing, at the core of most major IT environments, for decades represent the ideal hunting ground for Inertia driven business models. Maximizing their opportunity, vendors have created in-escapable contracts woven into a maze of hooks, traps and anchors which has deemed extortionate pricing models as widely accepted over the life times of these applications. Mainframe users have paid, and continue to pay, inflated fees so they can operate their own application assets.

The barriers to change are not too high and are completely scalable
Mainframe Modernization is a highly automated, scalable process which entails the decoupling of applications from their legacy environment, and harmonizing these in more cost effective, efficient environments, whilst preserving the entire asset value of applications and data. HTWC methodology enables scoping and scaling to suit, through the implementation of a completely integrated mainframe emulation environment.
It is commercially and technically compatible with application modernization options and defeats the Inertia beast.

It is predicted that many Mainframe shops are facing upwards of 30% annual cost increases in the coming years due to increases in MIPS consumption and mis-alignment between the system and application activities.
Since the 1980s, HTWC has been addressing many technical and commercial challenges of client mainframes.
The projects addressed have been large and small, and as testimony to our success, much of our clientele is repeat business, clients looking to iteratively address unnecessary costs without rolling out into full scale re-platforming projects.

“As a Mainframe Modernization specialist, we have the responsibility to understand Mainframes in detail and consult accordingly. We differentiate between System Fine tuning, and Application fine tuning”
Marco Grossi, CEO HTWC
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A common misconception is that, Mainframe Modernization is in competition with the Application Modernization strategies. Application Modernization or Replacement have a much higher scope in terms of cost, duration and return on investment timeframes. Mainframe Modernization has lower costs and short product and payback periods, which can mean either bottom line savings or shifting budgets away from License and Maintenance costs, over to the implementation of longer term Application strategies. Additionally, carving out and Re-platforming "left overs" has lowered barriers for many organizations wishing to embark on Application Modernization projects.

The City of Montpellier in France, re-architected much of its online application in ASP .NET, but some of the legacy Applications could not be modernized in this way. HTWC’s partner for the French market TELEBIG, announced the Migration of the remaining 15 critical batch applications from IBM z/OS to Windows and SQL server through the use of the HTWC XFRAME suite for the City of Montpellier, thus enabling the decommissioning of the Mainframe.
Download the City of Montpellier Case Study