Mainframe Modernization: From COBOL to Event Sourcing

This talk will explore modern programming techniques such as reactive programming, event storming, and domain-driven design to demonstrate how leading organizations in banking are modernizing their legacy systems -- including COBOL! -- to solve scaling, cost, and business continuity issues such as recruiting. We'll cover a mix of real-world use cases and our collective experience to help practitioners and technology leaders get started.

Anyone interested in reactive programming or how banks actually work should get a lot out of this talk. There are a host of business opportunities waiting to be unleashed through the power of reactive programming! For the most part, companies have stopped short of full modernization: bringing book of record systems into a modern era of technology. Meanwhile, customer adoption of these new platforms has led to an explosion of traffic to underlying legacy systems such as mainframes, resulting in huge cost increases, degraded performance and sub-par customer experiences.

We'll showcase the power of modern technologies such as Play, Akka, and Kafka, and how they are being used to break the chains of the past. We will demonstrate techniques such as event sourcing and CQRS for improving latency from mobile to mainframe from 10+ seconds to sub-second. In this always-on, always-connected era, consumers expect real-time insights. We'll show you a path towards real-time.

Speakers:

• Dom Wallace, CGI, Director, Emerging Technology Engineering
• Adrian Maurer, CGI, Director, Emerging Tech Practice Lead
• Dana Harrington, RedElastic, Chief Scientist
• Kevin Webber, RedElastic, Principal Consultant

This talk also signals the rebirth of ReactiveTO, which will be co-sponsored by RedElastic, CGI, and Inflection Group. Stay tuned for more events in the near future!