I remember when I used to go to the bank to deposit my paycheck. I would hand the check over to the teller, who would type for what seemed like five minutes before stamping it and saying, “your check has been deposited.” The teller would also usually ask me if I wanted to check my bank balance while I was there.

This experience is, for the most part, a thing of the past – everyone who has a bank account nowadays is a bank teller. We can transfer money to different accounts, pay bills and check our balance all from our bank’s mobile app or website. But what happens when your bank’s website or app goes down? There’s a good chance that you might take your business elsewhere and switch to a bank that provides a more reliable user experience.

There’s no arguing that the power of the mobile app is driving the application economy forward. But if the engine behind that power, the mainframe, can’t handle the processes at the back end, then you’ve got a problem. With 60 to 70 percent of business data in the world sitting on mainframes and mobile apps relying on access to that data, you can’t afford to have downtime.

Just as the concept of a teller depositing your paycheck is outdated in the application economy, so too is viewing the mainframe as a piece of legacy technology. The mainframe has the fastest database and Java engine on the planet. IT departments can harness this power to write modern tools that run at a pace to not only survive, but thrive in the application economy.

Between Linux, Java and the overall performance of the mainframe, tied together with DevOps, your business can enjoy positive benefits in the application economy without sacrificing the security, performance, scale and reliability mainframes have always delivered.

The mainframe is also the most secure platform that’s available in the world with EAL Level 5 certification, which is why businesses have built on it for decades. Like an application, you can apply identity management back into the platform to make your data secure.

So now that we know the role of the mainframe in the application economy, what’s its role in the dynamic data center?

The mainframe is a critical component for SaaS delivery, giving us the notion of connectedness and usage of infrastructure as a service within the data center. Application services and infrastructure are becoming the next generation of what we think about when we talk about the dynamic data center. It’s about the IT world giving the right IT answers. How we connect output management, business data and the mainframe to the vibrant data center of the future is with DevOps, big data management, workload placement across the cloud and, in general, connectedness across the platform.

While we may have lost some of the human connectedness in our day-to-day lives as the teller example at the beginning of this post illustrates, we are living in a world that is increasingly connected by apps. As CA Technologies CEO Mike Gregoire points out in a recent Fortune Q&A, “How many IP addresses are out there? A car is now just an IP address. An MRI machine is just an IP address. A refrigerator is just an IP address, it is running applications.”

This ever-increasing connectedness of our world is staggering. Gregoire went on to say that there will be 250 million machine-to-machine connections by the end of 2014. No industry is left unturned – from automotive to financial services to healthcare to retail – all industries are racing to participate.

So what are you waiting for? I’ll leave you with Gregoire’s words of wisdom about the mainframe and how it is more relevant than ever in the application economy.

I couldn’t agree more – especially when I want to do my banking any time of the day – even if it’s at 3 a.m. After all, since I’m the teller, the bank’s always open – unless the app crashes…

Image Credit: Myfuture.com

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