Turkish Airlines

Turkish Airlines has an ambitious plan to double the total capacity of its fleet of airplanes over the next decade, while only increasing the volume of transaction processing on its mainframes by 40%.

Ahmet Mahir Tuzcu, infrastructure manager for the Turkish Technology arm of the airline, told attendees at the recent BMC Connect 2024 conference that the airline has launched a mainframe application modernization initiative that will move some workloads off the platform to enable more transactions to be processed. For example, many of the flight availability queries that have historically been processed by the mainframe are being moved to another platform.

Turkish Airlines in collaboration with VBT Solutions, a partner of BMC Software that provides managed services for mainframe platforms, already manages more than 30,000 network connections that are made to the mainframes that Turkish Airlines relies on to process tickets and other requests for services. As the size of the overall fleet increases, the expectation is so too will the number of transactions being processed. The goal, however, is to not double the number of transactions processed on the mainframe as the number of passengers being served increases, said Tuzcu.

Turkish Airlines is joining a long list of organizations that, while not eliminating the need for mainframes, are looking for ways to control costs. Many of those efforts involve reengineering applications in a way that makes it possible to shift more workloads to other platforms in a way that makes more mainframe capacity available for other classes of workloads.

A recent IBM survey found that modernizing mainframe applications in a hybrid-by-design environment is a crucial step in their digital transformation journey, with 81% of respondents noting it is important for mainframes to easily integrate with other technologies. A total of 95% also noted that connecting mainframe workloads has become easier in recent years, and 75% noted mainframes are equal to or better than cloud computing in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO).

In theory, advances in generative artificial intelligence should make it even easier to modernize applications. In addition to being able to better understand how monolithic applications running on the mainframe are constructed, it is becoming easier to rewrite an application constructed using the COBOL programming language into Java code that can run on another platform. BMC, in fact, just added a generative AI assistant that, among other capabilities, explains how the underlying code driving an application was written.

Steve Dickens, a chief technology advisor for The Futurum Group, said that while mainframes still play a pivotal role in the enterprise, itโ€™s apparent that generative AI tools will provide IT teams with more flexibility when it comes to optimizing costs.

The challenge, of course, will be determining how best to prioritize those efforts, given the large number of applications that still run on mainframes. Regardless of approach, however, the one thing that is clear given the total cost of IT is that it has never been more critical to ensure the right workloads are running on the most cost-effective platform possible.

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