BT Group moves from mainframe to cloud with Kyndryl

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The BT Group’s Digital Unit has teamed up with IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl to begin working on a cutting-edge program to move several of the group’s mainframe applications serving its existing copper operations and consumer broadband products to the cloud.

This unique and complex project will enable Digital Units to operate their copper broadband infrastructure in a modern way by moving critical legacy applications that cannot be shut down in a short period of time to the cloud. A 10-year partnership leveraging Kyndryl’s hyperscaler capabilities and partner ecosystem will enable BT Group to reduce mainframe operating costs and energy consumption by 70%, saving more than £17m a year by 2026.

Harmeen Mehta, Chief Digital & Transformation Officer at BT Group, said:

“With that mindset, we worked with Kyndryl to figure out how to transform a legacy mainframe into a modern digital app and get it running for less.”

Kyndryl, which currently operates the BT Group’s mainframe assets, is extending its partnership with BT to deliver innovation projects through 2026, accelerating its drive to drive down costs and unlock data insights within these key applications. As part of the project, some applications will be ‘end-of-life’ (contributing to the Group’s goal of simplifying its technology assets by having fewer than 500 strategic systems by 2027), ‘refactoring’ (redeveloping them into BT Group’s existing strategic systems and architecture) It is becoming. Or rehosting (repackaging to work in a cloud environment).

As they move to the cloud, applications become more ‘digital’ through application programming interfaces (APIs) and microservice capabilities developed to help integrate data value across the wider BT Group system and drive innovation through automation. At the same time, you will save money. The application connects to BT Group’s service management platform and supports the ‘AIOps’ self-healing IT asset model to reduce the risk of downtime and accelerate and automate remediation. This enhances the ability of other applications to invoke data and functions within mainframe applications, providing a smoother customer experience and helping customers migrate to modern fiber optic services as legacy copper networks become obsolete over the next few years.

Petra Goude, Global Practice Leader for Core Enterprise & zCloud at Kyndryl, said: Migration from the mainframe to the cloud extends the usefulness and lifespan of these applications in a modern, microservices-driven, cloud-centric way and provides intelligent data insights. We are excited to deliver on this transformation by leveraging our deep knowledge, partner ecosystem and industry-leading community of experts.”