Welcome to Episode 57 of the Cloud Wars Horizon Minute — featuring news and commentary hosted by Acceleration Economy analyst Tom Smith. Each episode provides insights into one or more Innovation Accelerators on the Cloud Wars Horizon. This episode focuses on Kyndryl’s increasing emphasis on cloud connections for its mainframe customers.
Highlights
00:51 — Kyndryl has made a series of announcements; the most compelling prior to this week was an alliance with Microsoft to allow data from mainframe applications to be leveraged in the cloud so advanced cloud tools and apps could be applied to that data. That is especially important because of the mainframe’s endurance and its role as a system of record.
01:17 — This week the company announced a deal with Google Cloud that looks different than the Microsoft relationship. Kyndryl is working with Google Cloud to facilitate customer movement off mainframes to Google Cloud with a service called Dual Run. It lets customers simultaneously run an application on the mainframe and Google Cloud while they validate performance and functionality. Then the app can be shifted to run in the cloud while the mainframe can function as a backup.
02:10 — This simplifies the process of moving to the cloud; it overcomes some key barriers for mainframe customers.
02:22 — This is a big step for Kyndryl. There’s clearly risk involved, but it shows the company is giving customers the flexibility to run workloads on the platform that’s best for them. That’s a win for their customers.
