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Visitor FAQ
Alliance Mission Statement
The Mainframe Migration Alliance web-community is designed to support these objectives: - To provide a community where members can collaborate in order to make mainframe migrations easier and more effective
- To provide co-marketing, sales and support to partners and customers as they migrate workloads off the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform
- To raise awareness of the viability and advantages of the Windows platform as an alternative to the mainframe
- To raise awareness of the viability of migrating workloads off the mainframe
- To provide a central point for publishing migration-related information and having discussions around migration topics
Companies interested in knowing more about the Alliance or in exploring potential membership should send mail to mframe@microsoft.com with Mainframe Migration Alliance Inquiry in the subject line. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA)?
The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is a group of companies that are working together to help customers migrate workloads off of the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform. The Alliance represents a group of companies that have their interests aligned in making Mainframe Migrations easier and more efficient for customers.
Why have we formed the MMA?
Migrating workloads off the mainframe to alternative platforms has been going on for years. Now, with significant pressure in most organizations to free up the large maintenance budgets that mainframes consume, the interest to migrate to newer platforms is more widespread than ever. Using Windows Server 2003 and the .NET platform, the Alliance offers customers the information they need to achieve the scalability, reliability, and security they had achieved on the mainframe, while delivering much greater organizational agility and significantly lowering overall IT costs.
The discipline of mainframe migration is very specialized, and the companies involved have typically not shared much information with each other or done significant marketing around these migration capabilities. In short, there is no established ‘mainframe migration’ industry, with best practices, widely recognized methodology, ISV’s, System Integrators, or trade shows. Consequently, customers have a difficult time getting the information they need to migrate and have few sources of information other than individual tools vendors or the mainframe vendor itself. Alliance members believe that together we can help disseminate information about alternative solutions, and facilitate an orderly migration of mainframe workloads to the Windows platform.
The Mainframe Migration Alliance provides a community and focal point for the collection and dissemination of information for migrating off the mainframe and onto Windows. We think this will deliver very high value to enterprise customers.
We believe that the objectives, as explained in the Mission Statement, are shared by many companies, and that a coordinated collaboration through the alliance will provide significant value to customers currently running mainframe applications and looking to become more agile and cost-efficient.
Organization
To join the MMA, a company needs to execute a membership agreement with Microsoft. A copy of this agreement is available by sending an email to mframe@microsoft.com.
What is a mainframe?
While there is no firm definition of a mainframe, the vast majority of large legacy systems currently deployed are IBM or IBM Plug-compatible systems running MVS, DOS, VSE, os/390 or z/OS. For the purposes of the MMA, we are focusing on these stystems, or other systems of approximately equivalent size from other vendors; we are not focusing here on mid-range systems such as the AS/400.
Why focus just on mainframe migrations?
Mainframe customers typically have special requirements, such as near 100% application availability, or the ability to handle thousands of transactions per second. Addressing these requirements needs special attention requiring technical depth in both the mainframe and target platforms. By focusing on the needs of mainframe users, we believe this alliance can accelerate the migration of workloads off the mainframe and onto the more agile and cost-effective Windows platform.
Why focus on co-marketing activities?
We are focusing on co-marketing activities because we believe that information is needed most by mainframe customers. Migration customers are adversely impacted today because of the lack of the necessary community & information including case studies, reference materials, performance analyses, services & resources, and discussion groups. Once these needs are met, we may decide to increase the scope, nature, and charter of the MMA, but it would be premature to do so at this stage.
The MMA specifically does not get involved with:
- Standards setting
- Certifications
- Topics beyond migrating customers from mainframes
- Directly creating, implementing or providing products or services to customers
We do not believe there is a need for another standards body or a new set of specifications. Each mainframe application and workload is unique – the goal is to find the optimal solution to the customer’s business issues. We do not want to diverge from our initial focus on helping customers migrate workloads off the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform.
Who can join the MMA?
All members of the MMA have two things in common – their interests are aligned in helping customers migrate off the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform, and they have signed the MMA agreement with Microsoft. Any organization that meets these criteria and is willing to agree to the terms of the agreement can join. All software, hardware and service companies are welcome. There are no fees to join and no annual dues.
Will there be any MMA-specific events?
From time to time there may be MMA-specific events. These may include:
- Talks at trade shows
- Booths at trade shows
- Advertisements, or public announcements
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