Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Chris Livesey, SVP, CDMS, HC & CORBA, Micro Focus

Blind Jenga: Transitioning from Running to Transforming the Business

Companies have been continually battered by the stormy seas of competition, regulation, relevance and reputation and inevitably that will accelerate further in 2019. However, their ability to weather those storms is about to go supersonic. The world's biggest companies that run the world's most important social infrastructures in banking, insurance, healthcare, transportation, logistics, retail, etc. - will finally realise that the cloud is the new mainframe and that the value of many decades' investments that have appeared locked away and lost on these so-called "old" platforms, can actually emerge to be their biggest ever competitive differentiator.

Replacing applications will no longer be the normal procedure as there will be more benefits to those who instead choose to modernize and extend their existing business applications to remain competitive in their industry. With companies increasingly making the choice to move to the cloud, they will find that there are fast and cost-effective options for leveraging their old applications with new technology that comes with less risk than starting over. By optimizing existing resources and building upon the previously implemented technological investments, organizations will have the ability to move quickly and diminish risks while sustaining innovation. Eager decision makers will learn that moving mainframes to the cloud comes with its issues and complexities, but there are companies that will be there to assist organizations with a seamless integration that has the possibility to ultimately affect their overall value in a positive way.

Their unique business processes and knowledge, combined with unbounded volumes of customer data and insight are now able to be transformed without the cost, risk or delay of trying to start over. COBOL to cloud - you got it. Mainframe to mobile - you got it. These businesses are already waking up to how they can solve "new" competitive problems by exploiting "old" investments in applications and data through applying technology to realise new use cases for those applications and data which are independent of their technology heritage. There's no blueprint for innovation any more - no accepted standard on how you compete - and in 2019 the world's biggest companies will re-emerge as leaders through re-imagining their core strengths in new ways to solve those waves of disruption.

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About the Author

Chris Livesey is the General Manager of the Application Modernization and Connectivity Product Group, which provides products enabling enterprise companies to adapt to the new digital economy. In addition to the world's leading distributed COBOL products, the product portfolio enables customers to speed up development cycles, modernize user experiences and secure user access - all underpinned by the freedom to deploy applications and data across mainframe, distributed, mobile or cloud platforms.