IBM’s stock price suffered a heavy drop yesterday, partly due to the broader market movements, but primarily due to the publication of a blog post and guide 1 on modernization by Anthropic.

I covered modernization (thankfully not Cobol specifically though) a lot when I was at Gartner. I have had more briefings and demos for magic bullet solutions than I care to remember. Including the magic bullets IBM were developing in IBM Labs that became part of the catch all watsonx portfolio, albeit IBM were working from a far more defensive posture 2.

The difficulty is not, and has never been, just the code - it is everything around it. The people, processes, systems, reliability requirements, compliance and so forth all come into play. I have no doubt at all that AI can and will hugely accelerate some of the technical side of the changes - if there is an appetite in the org do to do it. I already see this a lot in my day-to-day work.

However, the attitude of the organisation – the digital literacy – is probably the most important factor. How do they view the ongoing maintenance of their investments in technology. Are technology projects one off investments – get me from point a to point b – or has there ever been an appetite for ongoing investment. Care and feeding. Ask yourself the question how did the organisations that are desperate for this magic bullet end up in this mess in the first place?

This pattern, that of people, processes, systems, reliability and compliance is the same pattern I often discuss when talking about DevOps 3. Leading organizations are way out in front, but people don’t realise just how far behind many companies really are. AI can be, and is, a massive accelerator here as well, once there is appetite for the level of change required and the skills to implement it.

The mistake that technologists make, in every wave of technology, is assuming that companies in other industries are already at comparable levels of maturity to technology vendors. That these companies want to move as fast as technology vendors do into the new technology of the year and have the appetite to keep changing things. They do not. In the vast bulk of companies’ technology is viewed as a large and annoyingly necessary cost. Strategic to some (and undoubtedly strategic to the leading companies in certain segments), but not to all.

To give Anthropic their due they address some of this in the actual guide associated with the blog post. But the timelines the give are in weeks not quarters to years. Which is fine in marketing. The technical component of this problem is not the hard part.

AI is undoubtedly going to massively impact legacy systems. Personally, I left the analyst world and joined GitHub almost four years ago as it was clear something big was coming. But to quote Bill Gates “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

As for IBM? For as long as I have been in the technology industry commentators have been predicting the demise of IBM. Is their mainframe business under threat? Absolutely. Has it ever not been? I would be much more concerned about the revenues of the IT service providers over IBM.

  1. The guide appears to have been written several months ago, its primary model references (as I write this) are Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.1. Most observers note that the massive step change in capabilities came with Opus 4.5. This is a long-prepared piece of marketing. ↩

  2. The guide from Anthropic highlights migrating code to a Java/Kubernetes stack. IBM know that many of their customers want to get off mainframes, customers hate the pricing. IBM have been trying to get these customers to migrate from Cobol to Java and run it on OpenShift for at least five or six years now. Previously it was Cobol to Java to run in WebSphere. The goal is to ensure the runtime is IBM. ↩

  3. If you are in a company that is serious about AI, you also need to be serious about DevOps and related topics. I strongly recommend getting a copy of Team Topologies and reading it from cover to cover. ↩