BT Group’s Digital Unit announced it is working with Kyndryl on a cutting-edge program to move a number of its mainframe applications which service its legacy copper business and consumer broadband products to the cloud.
The Digital Unit will move critical legacy applications that cannot be shut down in the short term to the cloud, allowing it to operate its copper broadband infrastructure in a modern way. The 10-year partnership, which draws on Kyndryl’s hyperscaler capabilities and partner ecosystem, will allow BT Group to reduce mainframe operating costs and energy consumption by 70 percent.
“We like thinking out of the box to solve complex problems – like how to move off mainframes given the prohibitive increase in legacy infrastructure cost – without rewriting decades-old applications,” said Harmeen Mehta, chief digital and innovation officer at BT Group. “With that mindset, working with Kyndryl, we figured out how to turn legacy mainframes into modern digital apps and run them at a fraction of the cost.”
Kyndryl, which runs BT Group’s mainframe estate, extends its partnership with BT to deliver the transformation project by 2026, accelerating the drive to reduce cost and open up data insights within these key applications. As part of the project, some applications are being retired, refactored or rehosted.
In moving to the cloud, the applications will become more “digital” with application programming interface (API) and micro-services capabilities developed to help integrate the value of data across wider BT Group systems and drive innovation through automation, while lowering costs. Applications will be hooked into BT Group’s service management platform and support its “AIOps” self-healing IT estate model, reducing the risk of downtime and accelerating and automating fixes. It also will enhance other applications’ ability to call on data and capabilities within the mainframe applications, giving rise to more seamless customer experiences, supporting customers with the migration to modern fiber services as the legacy copper networks are retired in the years ahead.
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