Today, mainframes still play a crucial role in the daily operations of most large enterprises. Much of their core business applications and data are on this platform. At the same time, these enterprises are investing in building out their information systems to take advantage of new technology intended essentially for the distributed world. The result is a two-speed information system.

This paper examines IBM mainframe strategy, how it affects long-term customers with legacy applications and decades-old mainframes and highlights an attractive application migration alternative to the IBM strategy.