As a moderately-sized company, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about your mainframe. You want to focus on the future, not the antique running decades-old applications in the background. But you can’t afford to ignore your mainframe, and here are four reasons why:

1. Service Decay

While you’re ignoring your mainframe, it’s getting bogged down by an explosion of unstructured data, increasingly complex applications, and unsupported tools. As the load on your mainframe increases, your service delivery times erode, and today’s customers aren’t going to sit and wait for your mainframe to finish chugging along—they’ll go find someone faster.

2. Rising Licensing Charges

Every month, you’re paying mainframe Monthly License Charges (MLC) to IBM based on your peak rolling 4-hour average usage. With their prices constantly rising, you can expect your licensing costs to increase 4 to 7 percent next year and into the future. Even if you plan to move away from the mainframe, that’s money you’re throwing away every month until you complete the transition.

3. Capacity Upgrade

Upgrading your capacity for mainframe processing is an expensive undertaking, but it’s something you must do as the amount of data you’re dealing with grows over time. The less often you need to do it, the better. If you can reduce your peak mainframe usage and delay the need for capacity upgrades, that’s a massive expense off your plate—at least for a while.

4. Innovation in the Mainframe

Fortunately, innovations in mainframe software can help you act on all of these issues, saving a ton of money in the process. BMC is innovating on the mainframe like no other vendor today. BMC’s Cost Analyzer and Intelligent Capping products will save you all the money you’re unnecessarily throwing into your mainframe.

IBM sends you your MLC liability like your energy company sends you your home energy bill: a simple report of how much you owe after you’ve already used the processing power. When you install BMC’s Cost Analyzer, you will immediately get a detailed look at exactly which systems and applications are responsible for your peak mainframe usage. Combined with powerful forecasting and modeling of future charges, Cost Analyzer can tell you exactly what to do to dramatically cut the costs of your mainframe.

BMC’s Intelligent Capping can help you save even more by allowing you to customize automatic capping of processes, further reducing your mainframe processing usage. It’s a dynamic, cost-aware tool that you can use to safely manage caps on low-importance workloads without risking your high importance services.

With just a little bit of attention, your mainframe can start working for you. Contact BMC and you can save tens of thousands each month on your mainframe.