Why Mainframe Modernization Keeps Failing at the Integration Layer
Every few years, a bank announces a major mainframe modernization initiative. There is a press release. A vendor partnership. Sometimes a new CTO with a mandate to "fix the legacy problem." Eighteen months later, the project is quietly descoped, the timeline has tripled, and the original mainframe is still running payroll, processing settlements, and doing exactly what it was doing before anyone decided to modernize it.
This is not a story about COBOL being bad. COBOL is actually fine. It is fast, deterministic, and battle-tested across billions of transactions daily. The systems built on it are not failing. They are, in many cases, more reliable than the cloud-native replacements being proposed.
The thing that keeps failing is the layer between those systems and everything else. The integration layer. And until the industry starts talking about that honestly, we are going to keep watching expensive projects collapse in slow motion.
The...
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