 We are starting a monthly series here called TFI Topic of the Month aka T3M. I like short names, acronyms. And the topic for the month of January was cost cutting versus cost efficiency. As you know as we walked into 2023, we saw major cost cutting measures across industries which included better control on cost as well as trimming down teams which swelled during the pandemic. For this series, I'll be sitting down with founders, CEOs and leaders of the industry to better understand what's going on and what organizations can do to ensure cost efficiency. And today we have with us once again, John Murtic, Executive Director of the Open Main Frame Project. John, it's great to have you back on the show. It's great to be here. Thanks. What are you seeing? What kind of trends you are seeing in the market when we talk about cost cutting or companies becoming more cost efficient? I think the one thing is the same thing that we're all seeing here right now is that we're seeing a ton of layoffs over the last couple of months here. And what's sort of interesting is these layoffs in a lot of ways, if you look at the numbers they're actually sort of reducing down to pre-COVID levels to some degree here. So it kind of is a little bit of a course correction, but I think I was even reading in some of the reports from the Google one, which was just a few days ago when we do this recording, that it was basically a lot of overestimating of where's the demands and they kind of just let the hiring kind of continue to grow as they saw just the market demand for talent was kind of scarce. They kind of hired up. And that's just a reality. I think as vendors are looking at this from a course correction point of view, what you often see is people really kind of coming back and saying, well, what are our priorities? What are we good at? What are the things that we need to be focused on? And I even remember talking with companies a long time ago about that. And I always kind of bring back to, well, what's your core competency? Like why do customers value you? What is the one thing that your competitors cannot bring you? And when you start to get into that mindset, then we get into the last of a cutting to grow. But I think as you alluded to, it's efficiency and it's optimization and so on and so forth there. So I think that's an overarching trend you see anytime, a company that's very mature approaches this scenario. And I'm seeing a lot of that here, which long term, I think is a good sign. What does this economic challenges look like for the mainframe ecosystem? First off, mainframes, like you said, it predates both of us by quite some time. And they have went through these valleys before. They've went through the economic challenges of the 70s. They went through the challenges of the 80s, early 90s, they've had the boom and so forth. So they've went through these cycles and every time they persevere, and why is that? There's such a central point to our society to function. All of that transactional processing from financial institutions to airlines to other transportation to healthcare to government all runs through it. So the need for that hardware is there. The efficiency that hardware can do that particular types of workloads is unparalleled. There's no other infrastructure that can do it at the same cost structure from that. So for companies that have the investment in hardware, and it's a big investment to get into, for them, they're looking at their hardware and they're looking at all their IT infrastructure and saying, well, how can we do better with this? How can we be more efficient? And what's nice is we're kind of at an interesting era as the open source communities around mainframe are growing, especially with a project like Zoey, which was really designed around the fact of how can I make my mainframe data more accessible through the rest of the enterprise? And what it has kicked off is this larger movement here of, well, well, geez, now I can use mainframe as a part of my end-tier architecture for applications. Maybe in some areas, I might actually think this might be a better place for parts of my workload, because we're moving away from those monolithic applications to services, multi-teers, things of that nature. What does that mean for a downturn? It means that a company is able to go back and look and say, I can do these workloads more efficiently here. I have the benefit if I don't want to learn ZOS, I have Z Linux that I can run on there, which is just like any other Linux, and I can shift things around to better optimize what I'm doing. So it fits into that whole thing. A company takes a step back and says, what is our core competencies? What are we here to do? What do we best staff to do? And how can then we use the infrastructure we have to do that appropriately? And I think it ties in perfectly. What kind of challenges when it comes to purely terms of cost that you are seeing there? And then we'll talk a bit about impact on mainframe ecosystem. You did touch upon that, but I just want to specifically talk about cost. I think companies are looking not just at their personnel, but the software and services that they support and what makes sense. Looking at subscriptions or looking at different software they purchase and they figure out, is this a good use across the business for us? Is there other tools that we can use much more efficiently? I would imagine any of the subscription-based software services out there are probably thinking about that as they plan their year out here that they're going to probably see a significant amount. They're going to see more than normal churn as companies are going to try to reduce onto different platforms and not have so much broadness. So I think that's going to be a part of there. I think the other half is the company is going to look back in the IP that they have built internally around software and services. They're going to say, how much of this do we really need to be the only one holding up the ship? That's where I'm anticipating new things coming out in open source because companies are going to realize, let's get a couple other people working on this. This should be a commodity piece here in a couple of years. Let's get ahead of the game and start doing this. A great example is actually one of the other foundations I work with in the Academy Software Foundation. They recently announced a project called Open Review Initiative, which has contributions from Sony, from D-NAG, from Autodesk of their various review and approval tools for motion picture workflows where the goal is, is they're going to contribute their tools into there, but then they're going to pull the best pieces out of all of that and make a canonical tool that the industry will eventually standardize on. That's the sort of things that I would start to see happening in this. I would not be shocked if we start to see this in the mainframe space or we have a couple of the big vendors come together and say, I have this tool, I have this tool, let's open source them and then let's use that as an exercise to figure out what are the best features of both, what are the key pieces of both, and then build something that the industry can build upon. What you're saying is that we'll see kind of an addiction and do it yourself for not invented here syndrome and folks will try to leverage open source in a way because as you rightly said, so we'll see a lot of growth and adoption of open source as well there. You're going to see people that are going to retrench, you're always going to have exception to that, but I think the people that have been through this cycle before know that this is where the opportunity that you can think longer ahead and you have other competitors that are in sort of similar positions. Like on the financial side, you tend to see a lot of mergers and acquisitions happening when the economy is sort of a low point because of a lot of the cost structures these companies that become easier to, you know, cheaper to pick up. It's a similar dynamic here, you know, these companies are retreading, they're all, I don't want to say they're in desperation mode, but they're certainly more actively interested in how to collaborate to be cost efficient and that ends up being an additional driver towards all of this. How is the open mainframe project helping the ecosystem solve this issue, which is, you know, once again, becoming more cost-efficient, optimizer resource, and of course you folks do open source. So it's a very well placed project. There's always the one half of the technical collaboration. We see projects like Zoe, Fei Long, you know, a number of our other ones, which are getting more mature. They're getting more adoption. They're really starting to stride and we're starting to see customers using those and that's a good sign there. The other half is we have projects that are more focused in our educational areas like the COBOL training course and mainframe open education, which are helping around the skills aspect. As these companies know, they're still going to need, you know, even though we're in a non-economy that doesn't take away the training aspect on the flip side, there's also people are going to be looking to re-career and having the training available and being able to use that as a way for people to identify talent is going to be a huge part as well. So I think that's a piece that we're seeing there. I think another and I think our mentorship program kind of flows into there nicely as well. That's going to be something that's just going to continue to grow for us. And I think a third wheel, which is one that we talked about at open mainframe summit and is slowly but surely been kind of iterating in the background is the mainframe is the modernization working group that has been launched. And where I see that coming into help here is not only just of the tactical of helping sort of redefine the market and add a lot of clarity on this, but as companies are looking to be more cost efficient, they're seeing a lot of mixed messages of how they approach their mainframe infrastructure with that and being able to have some true thought leadership based upon research, based upon where the market is, is a huge aspect. And those are really long tail things that will build out over time. But in the short term, they become opportunities to kind of help focus that work in the area of cost cutting or cost optimization because that's frankly, you know, when you hear the term modernization thrown in the mainframe, it's kind of has been considered a little bit of sort of that dirty word of meaning, you know, you're getting rid of something. Right. And the reality is, is it's probably that's, that's kind of like leading things way too far down the road. What it really is, is companies realizing they need to get modern, but they need to figure out with being modern, how do they work efficiently? Because that is part of modernization is efficiency. A downturn like this is just a driver for that. It kind of accelerates things. So I see that as another way these things are going to come together. What can resources are developed from the open mainframe project that can help organizations, companies, other players to kind of tame this, you know, beast that you're looking at right now? We have, like I said, a lot of our technical projects are great times for companies to go back and invest. Both folks that are vendors that are bringing products to market in the mainframe space. This is an opportunity for them to go and and look back and say, hey, is this is this a way that we can bring higher quality products to market at a lower cost by building on top of something or leveraging something like a Zoe, for example. So I think there's going to be one aspect there. Another angle of it is how can we improve sort of our dev ops efficiency as we bring in, you know, as we know, we have a number of legacy tools, you know, cobalt, things like that out there. And there was a great interview I think you did with bank data a few months ago that really tapped into that. And if you're a listener, you haven't listened to that. Go back and listen to it. I think it really talked about not just modernizing the tools, but also modernizing how the teams are built and how the training and how your approaches are and all of the things that they were talking about all were things that came from the open mainframe project, cobalt programming course, you know, cobalt checks, Zoe, all of those things. So I think that's going to be another angle of it. And then I think sort of I would see a third in there is looking back at the mentorship half of things. This is an opportunity for, you know, especially at our member companies, but folks are looking to drive stuff in the open source realm to work with the up and coming students. And look at that as sort of a way of bringing new focuses into their workforce. And the mentorship program is a great place for that. John, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this topic. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you.