My name is Shawn Hisaw. I am a Platform Owner at BlueCross BlueShield of SC. We are currently in the throes of a modernization journey that is changing the way we work, the way we communicate, and the way we define success. In many ways, we are a traditional mainframe shop. What we are beginning to understand is what it means to be a modern mainframe shop…on LinuxOne.

2023 was a banner year for our organization. We completed the first phases of several modernization efforts and blazed the trail for continued progress this year and for years to come. Here is the kicker…we did it on a mainframe. The idea of modernization and mainframes may seem counter-intuitive to some. I agree that there may well be a good punchline in there somewhere. The fact of the matter is that we chose to harness the power of the mainframe to facilitate our modernization journey and found the LinuxOne to be the optimal vehicle to take us there. We are now running fully operationalized, containerized, Kubernetes based workloads in Production on OpenShift…and they are running on LinuxOne. We have leveraged our expertise in mainframe virtualization (zVM and zLinux) to build an enterprise-grade foundational modernization platform, in the form of OpenShift on LinuxOne. Yes, millicores and IFLs can and do play well together!

We have established a significant legacy of traditional zLinux application workloads over the past 15 years. Many of these are our flagship, business critical applications which provide critical and essential services to our customers. As we look to 2024 and beyond, we have full confidence in our ability to scale on-demand, operate with zero-downtime, achieve real-time high availability, and continue to modernize and migrate business-critical applications to OpenShift on LinuxOne. Did I mention we plan to do so in less than 5 years (last year included)? LinuxOne makes it possible.

*The newest member of the LinuxONE 4 family has arrived - Discover the IBM Z LinuxONE 4 Express now!*