A mission with zero tolerance for error
IBM’s Information Management System, or IMS for short, has quietly been serving the worldwide economy for five-plus decades. However, it wasn’t a bank, health care provider, or a retail store that was the genesis for one of the most powerful transactional platforms on the planet.
It was the moon.
So, then, why does IMS even exist in the first place?
Originally, IMS solved a very specific challenge: “How do you manage continuously changing parts for a moon-bound spacecraft where a single mistake can cause mission failure?”
It was this requirement that shaped what IMS was then and continues to be to this very day. This simple requirement meant everything to the people on that space craft and now to a worldwide economy. That simple requirement was a zero tolerance for error.
A simple requirement worth repeating: Zero tolerance for error.
Today, IMS still takes that simple requirement very seriously as it solves a problem that modern architectures still struggle with: how do you merge innovation speed with absolute reliability and have a zero tolerance for error? Modern day cloud architecture systems provide for rapid experimentation and elasticity while IMS excels at stability, integrity, and long term trust. Together, they solve the enterprise problem of our day—IMS anchors the business while distributed platforms push the cloud’s edge.
Where IMS stands today
So, where is IMS at today?
IMS continues to power 72% of all the banks on the Fortune Global 500 list while reaching up to 100k transactions per second all while being backed by more than a century of experience on the IMS Support team. And it is not just the banking industry that sees heavy IMS usage: IMS has customers in many industries including the public sector, communications, insurance, computer services, retail, and travel.
Why enterprises continue to rely on IMS
These industries continue to rely on IMS because of:
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Proven resilience for mission critical workloads as it is built for “always-on operations”
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Unparalleled performance producing a low latency/high throughput workload
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How it is built for hybrid cloud flexibility by accessing data wherever it resides with no reason to migrate data to a new location
The evolution of IMS 15: Building toward the future
The current version of IMS, version 15, has been a long-running highly successful release that was initially focused on security and encryption and pivoted towards the eventual requirement to implement managed ACBs and the catalog.
With 15.1, IMS introduced pervasive encryption support for VSAM, logs, and other datasets as well as an improved RACF integration. IMS 15.2 brought in the IMS-specific OSAM data set encryption, which was optimized to run on IMS. It was followed up by 15.3 which brought the pervasive encryption to the IMS OSAM databases 64-bit support. Also within 15.3, IMS began to increase the investment in catalog enhancements with the ability to make non-structural changes without an outage and a catalog purge utility.
By 15.4, IMS was in full managed ACBs and catalog mode, as this release introduced zDDL DLIBATCH support. While not directly related to the catalog, this new utility is critical to the future when IMS requires DDL usage. Version 15.5 was really the release that set the table for the eventual catalog adoption requirement as multiple catalog related utilities and features were introduced to ensure a smooth transition for customers. With 15.6, IMS announced the requirement to adopt the catalog and managed ACBs which prepares IMS customers for the future.
While no date has been set for a DDL adoption requirement for IMS customers, DDL, with its SQL-like syntax, is absolutely the future for how customers manage their IMS databases.
So, then, where does IMS go from here?
The future of IMS: A three-pillar strategy
The future strategy for IMS breaks down into three distinct areas where the investment will continue, including:
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Modern ways of working with IMS
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AI driven serviceability and resolution
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Transactional and data scalability
Within the new modern ways of working with IMS, multiple interfaces are intended to be surfaced in the future which will eventually revolutionize the interactions with IMS. The human interaction with IMS will see a user interface accessed through a Web browser which will allow IMS users the ability to quickly start utilities, read the health of the system, and reach answers quickly through artificial intelligence tools. On the machine side of things, IMS intends to bolster how extensible the product is with operational level APIs that could be used for automation or tying IMS into other enterprise applications.
As the AI revolution continues with no signs of altering course, IMS needs to be at the forefront of the movement to ensure longevity and continued success. IMS is currently undergoing a three phase AI transformation to enable AI driven serviceability and resolution. In the first phase, IMS AI ingests and understands IMS documentation and provides an interactive chat that allows for follow up questions and explanation, dramatically increasing the speed of knowledge consumption. IMS users can receive instant advice on how to manage IMS which effectively removes hours of extensive human research.
In the IMS AI phase two, IMS AI ingests IMS SME knowledge, digitizing best practices and diagnostic processes to guide the IMS user through a step-by-step diagnostic experience, driving more knowledge independence. IMS AI is connected to a live IMS system via our information automation, which enables IMS AI to extract and analyze critical data sources.
And eventually, as IMS enters phase three of the AI transformation, the intelligence will be pervasive through the product, not only reacting to information and data gathered, but proactively leveraging the data to provide guidance prior to entering a trouble state. This is intended to be a deep connection to IMS with the capability to understand a comprehensive, live view of the system health and predict issues and inefficiencies that might prevent IMS from running at full capacity.
Built for the world’s biggest missions—Trusted then. Trusted now.
The world’s economy continues to trend upward and that drives growth amongst each of the industries that IMS plays a role. As a result, IMS needs to keep pace with the growth and drive transactional and data scalability within the core IMS product. Enabling IMS customers to drive more transactions through the pipeline and reduce the IMS footprint in the common storage areas continues to be a driving principle for IMS.
Scaling to meet the world’s transactional needs is the highest priority for IMS now and in the future.
IMS is pivoting to a new horizon. It is a force behind the world’s economy because IMS is built for history’s biggest missions, it is scaling to ever-increasing workloads, and it is being reimagined for modern, revolutionary challenges.
The statements made here are not intended to be any kind of formal announcement about IMS or any of its affiliated products nor anything represented here constitutes any semblance of a release date. Please refer to the Terms of Use.
Learn more about IMS:
Citations
- IBM IBV - Mainframes as mainstays of digital transformation - https://www.ibm.com/downloads/documents/us-en/10c31775c85402a2
- Fortune Global 500 website and IBM’s EPM Customer Database February 2025