Why There’s No Time to Wait
For AI and ML executives tasked with driving innovation and modernization, 2025 is a pivotal year. The demand for real-time data access, seamless integration, and cost-effective AI/ML workflows has never been more urgent. Yet, many organizations still struggle with siloed mainframe data, high latency, and complex legacy systems that delay insights, increase costs, and hinder the ability to deliver actionable AI-driven outcomes. These challenges create innovation bottlenecks, reduce agility, and limit the potential of AI and ML to transform business operations.
The clock is ticking. If your organization is still relying on outdated data integration methods like ETL or struggling to unlock the value of legacy systems for modern AI/ML frameworks, you’re already falling behind. VirtualZ is here to help you catch up — and get ahead — with proven, no-code solutions that deliver real-time mainframe data access, seamless integration with cloud-based AI platforms, and cost-effective modernization — without disruption or costly overhauls.
The future of AI and ML is here. Are you ready?
Top 2025 Initiatives for AI and ML Professionals
As AI and ML continue to reshape industries, executives are focusing on key initiatives to stay competitive and drive innovation. Here are the top 2025 goals for AI and ML professionals — and how VirtualZ can help achieve them:
- Accelerating Mainframe Modernization with AI
Goal: Seamlessly integrate AI and ML capabilities with legacy mainframe systems to modernize applications and workflows.
How VirtualZ Helps: VirtualZ’s Lozen and PropelZ enable real-time access to mainframe data, allowing AI tools to modernize applications without costly ETL or CDC processes.
- Enabling Real-Time Data Access for AI/ML
Goal: Eliminate data silos and provide real-time access to mainframe data for AI/ML models.
How VirtualZ Helps: VirtualZ solutions eliminate latency by providing direct, secure access to mainframe data, ensuring AI models are trained on up-to-date information.
- Reducing Costs and Complexity in AI/ML Workflows
Goal: Lower operational costs and simplify AI/ML integration with mainframe systems.
How VirtualZ Helps: By eliminating the need for data replication and ETL pipelines, VirtualZ reduces infrastructure costs and streamlines AI/ML workflows.
- Enhancing Security and Compliance for AI/ML
Goal: Ensure AI/ML models and data pipelines meet stringent security and regulatory requirements.
How VirtualZ Helps: VirtualZ keeps sensitive mainframe data on-platform while enabling secure access for AI/ML models, ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
- Driving AI-Powered Operational Efficiency
Goal: Use AI/ML to optimize mainframe operations and improve business outcomes.
How VirtualZ Helps: VirtualZ enables real-time data access, empowering organizations to leverage AI for predictive analytics, workload optimization, and automated decision-making.
The Rise of AI in Application Modernization
AI is revolutionizing how organizations modernize applications, refactor legacy code, and optimize operational efficiency. Key trends driving this transformation include:
- AI-Driven Code Refactoring and Modernization: AI tools are automating the conversion of legacy languages like COBOL and PL/I into modern languages such as Java and Python, accelerating re-platforming efforts.
- Intelligent Application Migration: AI assesses dependencies and workloads, helping organizations decide which applications to move to the cloud and which to keep on-premises, reducing risks and costs.
- AI-Powered Cloud-Native Development: AI enables automated deployment, monitoring, and security enhancements, helping teams refactor applications for microservices architectures.
- AI for Automated Testing and Validation: Machine learning models predict application failures, automate regression testing, and validate functionality, minimizing human intervention and speeding up time-to-market.
- AI-Enabled Data Analytics and Decision-Making: AI unlocks insights from legacy data, enabling predictive analytics, business intelligence, and AI/ML model training.
The Biggest Roadblock: Mainframe Data Access
Despite the promise of AI, accessing legacy data stored in mainframe environments remains a significant challenge. Traditional methods like ETL and CDC introduce:
- High Costs and Complexity: Custom coding, middleware, and manual tuning inflate expenses.
- Performance Degradation: Mainframe CPU and I/O resources are consumed by data extraction.
- Security and Compliance Risks: Data replication increases exposure to breaches and compliance violations.
- Data Latency Issues: Batch-oriented processes delay real-time insights, hindering AI-driven decision-making.
To fully capitalize on AI-driven modernization, enterprises need a modern, cost-effective approach to mainframe data access.
How VirtualZ Enables AI-Powered Application Modernization
VirtualZ eliminates the barriers to AI/ML-driven modernization by providing seamless, real-time access to mainframe data — without replication, transformation, or ETL pipelines. Our solutions — Lozen™, PropelZ™, and Zaac™ — empower organizations to integrate mainframe data directly into AI, cloud, and analytics applications.
Lozen: Real-Time, Read/Write Data Access for Modern Applications
Lozen enables modernized applications to read and write mainframe data in real time without changing the data’s location. This allows AI-powered tools to:
- Maintain seamless access to live mainframe data after migration.
- Avoid costly ETL and Change Data Capture processes.
- Keep mainframe data secure without duplication.
Industry Insights:
“Lozen was incredibly easy to install and configure. The step-by-step documentation made the process seamless, and with responsive support, everything worked as expected on the first try. Even with our complex AWS and mainframe environment, Lozen integrated smoothly, ensuring secure, real-time data access.”
— Gilberto Biondo, Sr. Specialized Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
“Lozen enables partial and incremental replatform projects, with some applications being replatformed and others staying on the mainframe. Being able to transparently access mainframe VSAM data in real time really helps replatform projects move forward — without having to build additional processes or controls around moving the workload, all while maintaining data integrity and currency. Micro Focus (now Rocket Software) provides a mainframe-equivalent CICS JCL IMS environment running COBOL and PL/I applications on distributed platforms. If VSAM data continues to reside on the mainframe, the tight integration VirtualZ has developed between Lozen and our File Handler means that batch applications can now access it remotely. Lozen provides a really good way of providing shared access to critical mainframe data between batch and online applications.”
— Neil Fowler, SVP, Software Engineering, Micro Focus (now Rocket Software)
“Lozen will be a total game-changer in the z/OS to cloud native migration space. The ability to transparently move enterprise applications to the cloud without having to move all the dependent data off the z/OS platform will revolutionize the process, the speed, and the risk mitigation involved in these complex efforts. We are excited to partner with VirtualZ as they bring this revolutionary technology to market. Lozen will be great for the Microsoft Azure business, and our mutual customers will see tremendous benefits and cost savings.”
— Barry Wordell, Worldwide Mainframe Migration Strategist, Microsoft Corporation
PropelZ: No-Code Data Access for AI and Cloud Analytics
PropelZ provides one-way mainframe data access to cloud-based AI, analytics, and data lakes without the need for manual coding or traditional CDC. With PropelZ, enterprises can:
- Power AI and analytics applications with live mainframe data.
- Reduce infrastructure costs by eliminating redundant storage.
- Enable seamless cloud-based decision-making.
What Customers are Saying:
“PropelZ is a very straightforward install — you create the ZFS, upload it, untar it, and it’s ready to go. It doesn’t take much time at all, just a couple of hours to get the product laid down and installed in a testing environment.”
— Jerry Edgington, Senior Solutions and Innovation Consultant, Mainline Information Systems
Zaac: Cost-Effective Mainframe Storage for AI Workloads
Zaac allows enterprises to store and retrieve mainframe data in hybrid cloud environments without expensive storage solutions. AI-driven analytics and machine learning models can:
- Access historical mainframe data efficiently.
- Meet compliance and security regulations with encrypted storage.
- Reduce costs by leveraging cloud storage instead of traditional DASD or tape.
What Experts are Saying:
“Perhaps most challenging to conventional thinking is the company’s Zaac™ solution, which allows mainframe applications to use cloud storage as if it were native DASD. This brings the kind of flexible storage options that distributed systems have enjoyed for years to the mainframe world, but without compromising on the platform’s renowned security and reliability characteristics.”
— Dale Vile, Co-founder, Freeform Dynamics
Effortlessly Access Mainframe Data for watsonx AI
As businesses increasingly adopt AI platforms like IBM watsonx to drive innovation, the integration of mainframe data becomes vital for unlocking deeper insights. VirtualZ Solutions for watsonx offers a seamless, no-code solution that enables watsonx customers to effortlessly access mainframe data for AI-driven insights.
The Challenge of Integrating AI with Mainframe Data
watsonx relies on vast amounts of data to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI models. However, many enterprises still house critical data on IBM Z mainframes, making it challenging to integrate this valuable data with cloud-based AI platforms like watsonx. Traditional data migration processes are often costly and time-consuming, limiting the potential for AI-driven innovation.
PropelZ: The Solution for watsonx Integration
PropelZ is designed to overcome the challenges of mainframe data integration, providing a streamlined and efficient way to incorporate this data into watsonx environments:
- No-Code Data Integration: PropelZ automates the extraction and integration of mainframe data into watsonx’s cloud-based environments, such as data lakes and warehouses, without the need for custom scripts or extensive IT resources.
- Access to Historical and Transactional Data: PropelZ enables watsonx customers to easily access mainframe data, allowing them to develop AI models using both historical and transactional data without the complications of traditional data migration.
- Cloud-Ready for AI Applications: PropelZ simplifies the transfer of mainframe data to cloud platforms where watsonx operates, facilitating seamless access for AI-driven insights.
Benefits for watsonx Customers
- Seamless AI Integration with Mainframe Data: PropelZ eliminates the need for traditional data migration processes, enabling watsonx to access mainframe data for faster AI model training and more accurate outcomes.
- Cost-Effective Data Access: PropelZ reduces the costs associated with manual data migration by offering a streamlined, no-code solution that directly connects mainframe data to watsonx’s cloud environments.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Whether data is stored on-premises or in the cloud, PropelZ adapts to meet the evolving data needs of watsonx customers, ensuring data is always available for AI applications.
- Secure and Compliant Data Handling: PropelZ adheres to strict security measures and industry compliance standards, safeguarding mainframe data as it integrates with watsonx.
Key Benefits of VirtualZ for AI-Powered Modernization
By enabling seamless mainframe data access, VirtualZ helps enterprises:
- Accelerate AI-Driven Modernization: AI tools can access live data without ETL pipelines.
- Reduce Costs: No need for expensive CDC solutions or manual data replication.
- Enhance Security: Keep data on IBM Z, minimizing exposure to breaches.
- Enable Real-Time AI and Analytics: AI models work with up-to-date mainframe data, not stale copies.
- Simplify Cloud Adoption: Direct integration with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Snowflake.
Conclusion: AI-Driven Modernization Needs Seamless Data Access
AI is revolutionizing application modernization, but legacy data access remains a major barrier to success. Traditional ETL and CDC methods introduce unnecessary costs, complexity, and delays — holding back enterprises from fully leveraging AI-powered transformation.
VirtualZ eliminates this challenge by providing seamless, real-time access to mainframe data, ensuring that AI-driven modernization efforts are not hindered by outdated data integration methods.
For IT leaders and AI teams looking to accelerate modernization while keeping costs low, the answer is clear: Unlock the power of mainframe data without replication, transformation, or complexity — with VirtualZ Computing.
Learn More
- Watch demos of Lozen, PropelZ, and Zaac.
- Try Lozen, PropelZ, and Zaac.
- Review all VirtualZ Solutions, Thought Leadership papers, and Solution Briefs.
- Explore our YouTube channel, podcasts, and blog.
- Still have questions? Contact us.