IBM software chief and chief commercial officer Rob Thomas said the current AI-driven push to translate COBOL code is being widely misunderstood, arguing that code translation is not the same as modernizing enterprise platforms. He said IBM Z’s value comes from its tightly integrated hardware-software stack—delivering resilience, security, performance, and scale—and that the hardest modernization work involves data architecture, runtime replacement, transaction integrity, and non-functional requirements rather than language conversion. Thomas also argued AI should strengthen the mainframe case by accelerating on-platform refactoring, DevOps modernization, and skills-gap mitigation, and he questioned whether SaaS-only approaches can meet sovereignty and dependency constraints.

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