A Platform-Smart Approach to Mainframe Modernization

Insights from Gartner^® on evaluating workload placement and migration strategies

While industry hype often pushes total mainframe exits, large-scale enterprise environments require a more nuanced, platform-smart approach to avoid unnecessary risk. The Gartner research provides actionable insights for matching mission-critical workloads to the right infrastructure, at the right time, we feel helping you balance the unmatched stability of the mainframe with the dynamic scalability of distributed cloud environments.

Modernization succeeds when you align your technology choices with business reality, ensuring every workload runs where it safely delivers the greatest value.

And as you make those choices, consider Rocket^® Software’s replatforming and refactoring solutions for a cost-effective, low-risk, and minimally disruptive path to modernizing mainframe applications and code. Using proven automation and modern tooling, Rocket streamlines application analysis, development, testing, replatforming, and refactoring across mainframe, distributed, cloud, and hybrid environments—platform smart. 

For more information, see: Rocket^® Software Enterprise Suite.

Read the full Gartner research report here

¹ Gartner, Too Big to Fail: Why Mainframe Exit Projects Are Likely to Fail in the Age of Generative AI, By Dennis Smith, Alessandro Galimberti, and Tobi Bet., April 2026.

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