Legacy mainframe migration, modernized

The brief

An American Fortune 500 integrated communications company grew fast through the 1990s and early 2000s, expanding through acquisition into a nationwide operation. But as the company scaled, its legacy infrastructure didn't scale with it.

The challenge

Legacy technology has a way of quietly becoming a growth constraint. According to McKinsey, tech debt accounts for approximately 40% of IT balance sheets industry-wide, capital that could otherwise go toward new products, automation, and better customer experience instead of just keeping old systems running.

That's exactly the trap this client was in. In 2004, the client acquired a printing facility in Nashville, Tennessee, an acquisition that exposed just how far behind their legacy mainframe platform had fallen. Supporting it meant stitching together an ever-growing number of systems around an aging mainframe core. Historical customer and internal communications sat locked away in archives the business could no longer easily reach, and the platform had no disaster recovery capability. The client needed a real data infrastructure strategy, not another patch.

The solution

Tenjumps built a migration roadmap that identified commonalities across the client's 300+ legacy applications, so we could move by pattern rather than migrating each application one by one. We migrated all 300+ applications off the mainframe and onto a modern, open systems platform, consolidating the client's data into a single accessible system for the first time.

The result

The migration significantly reduced operational risk and gave the client one source of truth for their data instead of a patchwork of disconnected systems. This kind of shift pays off broadly: Kyndryl's 2025 State of Mainframe Modernization survey found that organizations moving workloads off the mainframe now report an average ROI of 362%. For this client, the migration also unlocked real operational flexibility: they could now print and ship materials from any of their U.S. facilities, cutting shipping costs. In total, it lowered the client's ongoing operational costs by $300,000 annually.