The stakes remain high for IT leaders. Not only do they have to respond to dynamic business demands in real time, they must optimize operations on their increasingly complicated multi-platform, multicloud environments– all while simultaneously managing resources and budgets. In short, the mandate for IT leaders remains: “Do more with less.”

Today, IBM is announcing new services and capabilities for IBM Z® to further position it as a center point of a secured hybrid cloud strategy. Our mission is to empower our customers, giving them more confidence, flexibility and agility when it comes to building and running their environments. We’re providing more options than ever before to control their business the way they want¹— without exposing them to the high costs typically associated with complex platforms.

Cloud-like pricing means simplified management

In the era of hybrid and multicloud, everything is connected and workload patterns constantly change. In this environment, managing demand for IT services can be a major challenge. And when it comes to pricing, flexibility and management are essential. As more customers shift to an enterprise IT model that incorporates on-premises, private cloud and public cloud, we’ve developed a simple cloud pricing model to drive the transformation forward.

Today, we’re introducing Tailored Fit Pricing for IBM Z, a revolutionary pricing model innovation for today’s enterprise IT environment. It’s designed to deliver the simplicity, transparency, and flexibility of consumption-based pricing, with economies of scale for workloads on IBM z/OS. The hallmark of this model is that pricing adjusts with usage, removing the need for complex and restrictive capping, and includes aggressive pricing for growth. The capacity solution, also part of Tailored Fit Pricing, enables clients to mix and match workloads to help maximize use of the full capacity of the platform. At the end of the day, Tailored Fit Pricing is designed to both unlock the full power of the platform and ensure optimal response times and service-level agreements, 24/7.

And it’s not just for IBM. Today one of our ecosystem partners, Broadcom, also announced the availability of a consumption-based pricing model to support their workloads on the mainframe. It is intended to complement and work seamlessly with our MSU-based pricing strategy. The pricing change was immediately popular within the ISV ecosystem. BMC and Compuware are also supportive of and offer their own open, flexible pricing models intended to provide a more seamless customer experience.

Similarly, our customers are enjoying the benefits. Terry Glover, the director of infrastructure at Dillard’s, said that “with Tailored Fit Pricing, we don’t have to worry about predicting demand any more. Instead, we can leave capacity on—and pay only for what we use.”

In addition, Waldemar Ruggiero Júnior, infrastructure director at Bradesco, shared “As mobile banking continues to surge in Brazil and we digitally transform everything we do, Tailored Fit Pricing gives us a simple and predictable cloud pricing model that can reduce operational overhead, so we can deliver cost-effective, client-centric services with our private cloud.”

Broaden your application portfolio

And we’re not stopping there. In this spirit of building even more flexibility into operations on Z, IBM is also announcing IBM z/OS Container Extensions, engineered to modernize and extend z/OS applications. We’re giving our customers the ability to run Linux on IBM Z Docker container in direct support of z/OS workloads on the same z/OS system.

With z/OS Container Extensions, customers will be able to access the most recent development tools and processes available in Linux on the Z ecosystem, giving developers the flexibility to build new, cloud-native containerized apps and deploy them on z/OS without requiring Linux or a Linux partition.

Empowering a universal cloud development and management experience 

Finally, we’re introducing IBM z/OS® Cloud Broker, which gives users the ability to access and deploy z/OS resources and services on IBM Cloud Private, and to help them achieve a more seamless and universal cloud development experience. IBM z/OS Cloud Broker is designed such that cloud application developers can provision and deprovision z/OS environments to support the app development cycle.

The result? A design for simplified management and access to critical enterprise services: IBM z/OS Cloud Broker provides a single control plane across z/OS, Linux on Z, Power, and public cloud. In turn, this can help optimize management efficiencies and achieves optimal speed for innovation.

Of course, in today’s hybrid and multicloud world, choice and control are critical. Which is why these new offerings will be especially powerful when combined with the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect family of cloud-native services. Enterprise developers have access to industry-leading security and resiliency to modernize their applications. Hyper Protect offers a range of on-premises and off-premises deployment choices for extending IBM Z services and data—while balancing performance, availability or security. Next month, for example, Hyper Protect Database as a Service (DBaaS) will launch. DBaaS will support cloud-native developers by providing both PostgreSQL and MongoDB Enterprise Advanced database choices. It also provides the highest level of commercial data confidentiality for sensitive data, FIPS 140-2 Level 4.²

As part of IBM’s goal to give our customers end-to-end control of the hybrid cloud platforms they rely on, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge our extensive software portfolio, which has thoughtfully been designed for customers to accelerate their digital transformations. If you’ve started your own transformation, this may sound familiar, but we’re seeing customers 1) use APIs and cloud-native dev tools to better utilize existing assets or evolve new services, 2) leverage IT operational analytics for insights and business efficiencies, and 3) seamlessly integrate workloads across cloud platforms—or all of the above.

In the end, we see secured hybrid and multicloud as the future of enterprise IT, and IBM Z is at the center. This is only the beginning! Stand by for exciting developments, news, and announcements that demonstrate IBM Z’s leadership and how we’re defining the future of hybrid cloud.

¹ – 80% of IBM Z customers look for providers who offer both hybrid and private cloud. (IBM Sponsored Primary Research, MD&I Systems and Cloud NDB 2019)

² – The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2 is a U.S. government computer security standard used to approve cryptographic modules. It is issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Level 4 is the highest level of security.