For Founder Jeanne Glass, a native of Columbia Heights, Minnesota, starting VirtualZ was a longtime dream. Encouraged by family, she started a career in mainframe computing at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire while enrolled in Management Information Systems focused on COBOL programming. Early in her career, she was appointed to senior leadership positions at VC Kleiner Perkins–funded and other tech startups including prominent companies such as FICO, Tripwire, and CA Technologies (now Broadcom).
During 11 years with CA Technologies Jeanne fell in love with the mainframe—helping mainframe customers solve their most complex technical and business challenges. Today, focusing her entrepreneurial energy on VirtualZ to develop new mainframe technology brings Jeanne’s high-tech expertise full circle.Founded by a team of professional collaborators and innovators with over 150 years of mainframe experience, VirtualZ is dedicated to improving, automating, and optimizing mainframe computers with innovative software. The company is proudly headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for decades recognized as the global epicenter of computing, birthplace of the supercomputer and home to Univac, Control Data, IBM Rochester, and Honeywell. As consumers, we don’t see or touch mainframe computers like we do our mobile and home devices, but we all use mainframe computers daily. The last time you used your credit card, bank ATM, or made airline or hotel reservations you used a mainframe computer.Mainframes are the most secure, reliable, and scalable platform in the world. They are designed to support cloud computing, big data and analytics; technologies of today and the future. It’s estimated that up to $3 trillion in commerce flows through mainframes daily:
- Running 30 billion transactions per dayHolding 80% of the world’s business dataHandling 90% of all credit card transactions; hosting more transactions daily than GoogleProcessing nearly $5 billion in ATM transactions daily
This power, reliability, and security comes at a cost: the mainframe is one of the most expensive computing platforms in the world. As a result, mainframe customers hire teams of people and spend millions of dollars trying to cost-optimize their environments. At a time when we need mainframes more than ever, many companies are looking for ways to reduce costs, including moving from the mainframe to more vulnerable and less reliable computing platform.
VirtualZ empowers mainframe users to approach cost-saving efforts differently. Using VirtualZ’s automation and intelligent programming, customers can reduce the number of expensive software licenses running in their environments, and for the first time, they can license mainframe software as a service with zWaaS™. What we now know as cloud computing was commercially popularized about 15 years ago by Amazon. However, the benefits of cloud computing have eluded mainframe environments and applications.This gap in the market—the ability to dynamically use cloud resources to execute mainframe workloads – presents a tremendous opportunity in mainframe computing. Without some of the analogous cloud technologies available on other platforms, mainframe leaders are faced with the same old choices for cost reduction and operational efficiencies. Some manually move data and/or workloads off the mainframe, migrate to a managed service, outsource, or attempt to re-platform applications.
This creates substantial challenges in time, cost, and risk and if completed, proves difficult to retain or regain control of systems, data, workloads, and costs, not to mention the comparative compromises to security and availability. Instead, VirtualZ’s groundbreaking technology replaces those strategies with the benefits of cloud computing on mainframe computers: pricing flexibility, scalability on demand, and accelerated time to market. Now mainframe users can maintain mission-critical mainframe workloads on internal mainframes as appropriate for their business, but with new flexibility to dynamically select when, where, and how to automatically and securely move individual IBM Z workloads to private or public clouds.By bringing cloud flexibility to the mainframe, VirtualZ enables customers to easily shift workloads to clouds to achieve lower costs, fulfill excess capacity needs, flexibly test, and deploy applications and also execute mainframe applications in the cloud, still controlled by the user but managed by a service provider. Given today’s high-volume, transaction-based world, VirtualZ believes rethinking how and where mainframe software is licensed, priced, and deployed will enable the mainframe to continue its reign as the most secure, reliable and available platform in the industry.
