Legacy platform expertise that's getting scarcer every year — paired with the modern integration and cloud skills to bridge mainframe with everything else.
Roughly 70% of enterprise transactions still touch a mainframe. Banks, insurance carriers, government agencies, and airlines depend on z/OS for their systems of record. That's not going away in the next decade.
But the people who know these platforms are retiring, faster than they're being replaced. Mainframe talent scarcity is a real, quantifiable risk to enterprise operations.
VanPaulTek keeps engineers who've maintained large-scale mainframe environments through decades of change. If you run z/OS workloads today, we support them — and, when the business case is right, we help you plan the modernization path.
Deep fluency across the technology that runs mission-critical enterprise IT.
IBM's flagship mainframe OS — batch and online workloads.
Application development, maintenance, and modernization of COBOL business logic.
Batch job control, scheduling, and operations.
Online transaction processing — the workhorse for real-time enterprise workflows.
Relational database on the mainframe — SQL, stored procedures, performance tuning.
Legacy record-based data — extraction, integration, and modernization strategies.
Hierarchical database and transaction manager — still critical in many shops.
The specialized skills that keep truly ancient business logic running.
Bug fixes, enhancements, documentation for COBOL/CICS/DB2 systems.
JCL, scheduling (CA-7 / Control-M), abend response, batch window optimization.
Query tuning, schema evolution, reporting extractions, cross-platform data pipelines.
Wrap mainframe transactions in REST APIs so modern apps can consume them.
Assessment, business case, and phased migration paths to modern platforms.
Refactor to Java/Cloud where the case is real. Keep on z/OS where it isn't. Honest recommendations.
Regulated-environment posture — controls, evidence, audit support.
Pair with your team to preserve institutional mainframe knowledge before it retires out.
On-call coverage for production mainframe environments — SLAs available.
Application inventory, dependency map, risk register, team-knowledge audit.
Documentation, runbooks, monitoring, alerting — the boring wins that reduce risk.
Take over daily operations to a defined scope — freeing your team for strategic work.
API layers, integration streams, modern consumers of mainframe data.
Where the case is real, phased migration to modern platforms — with the mainframe still running until cutover.
Ongoing support, always. Mainframe systems don't retire quickly.
Match the level to your platform's criticality.
Take over daily operations of a federal mainframe workload with cleared engineers.
Optimize an overrunning nightly batch cycle so it fits back inside the window.
New feature work on a decades-old system that still handles millions of transactions.
Expose CICS transactions as REST APIs so modern apps can use the system of record.
Phased plan for retiring a mainframe workload — realistic on cost, effort, and risk.
Pair with a retiring engineer's team to preserve institutional knowledge in documentation and runbooks.
Yes. Around 70% of enterprise transactions still involve mainframe systems, and industries like banking, insurance, government, and airlines continue to invest heavily in z/OS. It's not going anywhere soon.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. We give honest assessments based on cost, risk, and business value — not our preferences. Sometimes the answer is 'not for 10 years'; sometimes it's 'yes, start next quarter'.
Yes. Familiar with FISMA, StateRAMP, and other regulatory posture common to mainframe-heavy federal environments. Cleared resources available.
Common. Part of our stabilize phase is creating the documentation that should have existed. We reverse-engineer where necessary.
Yes. Many enterprise shops run both. Our engineers work across the online and hierarchical stacks.
Fixed-fee for scoped modernization work. Time-and-materials for enhancement backlogs. Managed services on tiered monthly retainers. Named FTEs available for long-term arrangements.
Reach out — we get back within 1 business day.
