Getting to know Prema
The mainframe continues to evolve not only through technology innovation, but through the people redefining its future. Among them is Prema Jogdand, Principal Automation Engineer at BMC Software and an IBM Influencer (2025), whose career reflects a powerful combination of deep technical expertise and forward-looking vision.
With nearly two decades of experience across IBM Z and IMS, Prema represents a new generation of leaders bridging foundational systems with modern enterprise demands, including automation, observability, and AI-driven operations.
Prema’s career spans from roles at Wipro, IBM, and BMC Software, where she has built extensive expertise across IMS, DB2, COBOL, PL/I, REXX, JCL and high-volume transaction systems. Today, she leads automation and quality engineering initiatives focused on IMS-centric environments, while driving R&D team strategy, cross‑product execution, and innovation across enterprise mainframe solutions.
Her approach reflects a core principle relevant to many organizations modernizing critical infrastructure:
Understanding the core of a system is what allows you to modernize it with confidence—and IMS gives you that core.
She works closely with customer support and product teams to ensure IMS systems remain resilient, modern, and future‑ready.
IMS as the engine of mission-critical workloads
Across industries such as banking, insurance, and healthcare, IMS remains central to delivering the performance, integrity, and availability required for mission-critical operations.
Prema emphasizes that while IMS often operates behind the scenes, its impact is foundational:
IMS may not always be visible, but it’s always dependable.
In her current role, IMS is integral to daily operations—from validating real-world workloads to optimizing performance at scale. Through her work managing control regions, message processing programs, and subsystem integrations, Prema helps ensure systems operate reliably to meet demanding enterprise requirements.
Driving operational excellence through automation
A defining focus of Prema’s work is leveraging automation to manage complexity and improve efficiency.
By integrating IMS with APIs, scripting frameworks, and monitoring tools, she has helped reduce operational overhead while enhancing system visibility and performance. These approaches enable teams to operate more efficiently while maintaining the precision required for mission critical workloads.
Her experience reflects a broader truth about the platform:
IMS doesn’t simplify complexity—it masters it.
This ability to harness and manage complexity is what continues to differentiate IMS in environments where precision and reliability are essential.
Evolving with the enterprise
IMS continues to evolve alongside the enterprises it supports. Prema has been closely involved in recent advancements, including IMS 15.6 upgrades, adoption of the IMS catalog, and the introduction of OpenTelemetry for improved observability.
For Prema, what stands out is not just the innovation itself, but the way IMS balances progress with continuity—allowing organizations to modernize without disruption.
A system introduced in 1968 that still integrates with cutting edge technologies—that’s not legacy, that’s engineering brilliance.
From a technical perspective, her work includes managing key IMS components such as Control Regions, DL/I processing, Internal Resource Lock Manager (IRLM), Sysplex environments, Message Processing Regions (MPRs), and the IMS Common Service Layer (CSL). She also works extensively with integration technologies including IMS Connect, Open Transaction Manager Access (OTMA), and external subsystem connections with Db2 and MQ.
Together, these capabilities enable IMS to operate seamlessly within hybrid and API-driven architectures.
Today, IMS continues to fit naturally into cloud-enabled, hybrid environments, proving that its role is not diminishing but expanding as part of the modern enterprise ecosystem.
Shifting perception through community and advocacy
While technology continues to advance, Prema identifies perception, not capability, as one of the most significant challenges facing the mainframe ecosystem.
Despite powering the world’s most critical workloads, platforms like IMS are often overlooked or misunderstood by the next generation of technologists.
Addressing that gap has become a key focus of her work. Through mentorship, university engagement, and industry speaking, she actively brings mainframe conversations into new spaces, from early-career engineering programs to global technical forums. Her goal is simple but impactful: to help others see IMS not as a legacy system, but as a modern, evolving platform with a central role in the future of enterprise IT.
Her experience at the IBM IMS Customer Internship in San Jose, CA in May 2025 provided direct exposure to both current innovations and what lies ahead for the IMS ecosystem. Equally valuable was the opportunity to interact directly with the teams shaping that evolution—offering a behind-the-scenes view into how the platform continues to modernize while preserving its core strengths.
The experience reinforced a belief that continues to guide her work: progress in the mainframe space is driven not only by technology innovation, but by the people and collaboration behind it. It also strengthened her conviction that visibility plays a critical role in the platform’s future.
The future of the platform depends on visibility as much as innovation.
This commitment to advocacy and education is essential to sustaining the skills pipeline and ensuring continued growth across the ecosystem. By bridging experience with outreach, Prema is helping reshape how the next generation engages with IMS, ensuring that its story is not just told but understood.
A platform for the future
Looking ahead, Prema sees IMS continuing to play a foundational role, that is enhanced by automation, observability, and AI-driven intelligence. Rather than being replaced, the mainframe is becoming increasingly connected, intelligent, and adaptive within hybrid enterprise environments.
Her perspective reflects a broader shift in how organizations view the platform:
The mainframe doesn’t have to choose between its legacy strengths and an intelligent, automated future.
For Prema, the story of IMS is not about longevity alone, it is about continued relevance. A platform that has quietly powered the world’s most critical workloads for almost 60 years continues to evolve to meet the demands of a new era.
And ultimately, she reframes the narrative around IMS and its role in enterprise IT:
In a world that demands speed, trust, and resilience, IMS isn’t outdated—it’s underrated.
The next chapter of the mainframe
Prema Jogdand’s experience highlights a larger transformation underway. The mainframe is no longer viewed simply as a system of record, but as a platform for innovation, integrating with modern technologies while continuing to deliver the reliability enterprises depend on.
As she succinctly puts it:
The mainframe is rising, with a new face and new capabilities every year.
The future of IMS will not only be defined by what it has done, but by what leaders like Prema are enabling it to become.
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