On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright were credited with the first powered flight in the world at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, less than 200 miles away from where I sit. This was the culmination of a race among many aeronautic innovators of the time. The key to the Wrights’ success involved a crucial element the other innovators lacked: control. You see, the science of aeronautics was pretty well understood, and the engines were strong enough to generate flight, but no one had quite gotten the knack of what was considered a successful powered flight. Until the Wrights determine that control was required. Their three-axis control system enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft and maintain equilibrium and remains a standard on all fixed-wing aircraft of today, 120 years after their historic flight.

Fascinating, Brian … but what does this have to do with the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack?

Glad you asked. The race among contemporary technology companies is in generative AI. Here at IBM, we’re focused on addressing business-to-business challenges with watsonx; for IBM Z, we’re focusing on accelerating mainframe application modernization using generative AI via the IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z. This innovative offering provides the ability to rapidly analyze, refactor, transform and validate your COBOL code into Java code.

So, back to the Wright Brothers. We have the science figured out: large language models. We have the engines figured out: CPUs, GPUs, etc. The issue then is how best to control all this power and energy to maintain equilibrium.

This is where the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack comes in. At its core, this offering is designed to provide an end-to-end, integrated application development solution. The various processes associated with application development (cloud application development, mainframe application development, API development) work together on top of an enterprise-managed platform. That’s achieved by being optimized for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform; the value isn’t merely in OpenShift but what that integrated platform offers: the ability to administer the platform as a service for application modernization.

Thus, your modern control plane (pardon the pun) — built with modern, industry standard tools and languages. By deploying a modern pipeline with modern tools, you have enabled the control required to allow application developers to delve into more advanced spaces, such as generative AI. A developer can use the IDE of choice — such as the VS Code capabilities available with watsonx Code Assistant for Z — within the continuous integration pipeline and, once the code is transformed, it can now be managed, built, tested and deployed within the pipeline.

The IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack is the complementary offering that enables the other capabilities required in your DevOps pipeline. As application modernization projects start — and grow — the focus around generative AI will continue. It’s not that generative AI will perform the modernization for you; it’s that generative AI will augment your developers’ skills. Giving your developers the best tools to perform their tasks will be critical in ensuring time to value. 

Furthermore, the foundational aspects of the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack, those components that allow system programmers and/or administrators to deliver a z/OS as a platform as a service, will also see the benefits around generative AI. The OpenShift optimization comes with a marriage — of sorts — to Red Hat Ansible. Earlier this year we introduced the Operator Collection SDK, which provides developers the ability to take their Ansible playbooks and convert those into operators that Cloud Broker can recognize — and therefore manage — as part of its PaaS topology. With watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, those playbooks can be developed with generative AI much more quickly, and the resultant playbook can be applied to your z/OS environment via Cloud Broker. 

With Red Hat’s recent announcement that the Ansible Automation Platform will run on IBM Z, a client gains even greater control for a modern, generative AI-assisted approach to automation by having both OpenShift and Ansible running in Linux on IBM Z environments, managing Linux on IBM Z and/or z/OS workloads.

With this latest delivery of IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack, we’re continuing to bring tighter integration to the market by expanding the technology to our ecosystem partners. The inclusion of open-sourced OCI artifacts in the Z Package Manager, a broader set of capabilities in the Wazi Deploy feature, our own delivery of open-sourced IMS and CICS Operators for use in the included Wazi Sandbox for testing, all contribute to this end-to-end integrated solution.

Before you take off on your generative AI-assisted application modernization journey, make sure you’ve got the right tools for a safe flight and a smooth landing. For more information about how you can get started with IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack, visit our product page.