Model9: Shifting Focus to the Importance of Effective Business Data Management Solutions
Model9 focuses on connecting the core enterprise business platform, the mainframe, with the cloud and its ecosystem by protecting mission critical data and expanding its business value. Model9 delivers true modernization, based on the low-risk, high-impact step of liberating data and allowing its redeployment across platforms, without the risk and complexity often associated with a full application migration project.
This capability can support initial, ad hoc, “proof of concept” exercises of limited scope or massive, full-scale data migrations to the cloud. The technology is efficient and highly scalable and provides a foundation for any migration or transformation program, putting data owners fully in charge of using their data in the cloud.
One of the “low-hanging-fruits” that many organizations have embraced as a first step in digital transformation is implementing cloud backup and DR directly from the mainframe to any cloud. Backup, archive, and DR, using object storage in a cloud such as AWS, can quickly supplant old, on-premises storage and give enterprises a solid basis for implementing more ambitious modernization challenges.
Model9’s ability to transform proprietary mainframe data types to common data formats liberates previously siloed data for use in cloud applications, especially the BI/AI/ML tools enterprise companies rely on to compete now and in the future. It also rapidly enhances the potential for data integration across platforms and boost digital transformation initiatives.
All About Customer Centric Innovations
Model9 has always focused on helping organizations transform by breaking down data silos, adding mission critical data to data lakes, and unleashing the power of decades of stored data for use in modern applications. Model9 is a foundational enabler by giving I&O leaders the tools they need to fully complete their cloud-first strategies. Organizations that have been wary of moving forward and embracing change now have a new opportunity to move forward with Model9.
The company’s journey began with a determination to liberate thousands of petabytes of enterprise data. With its “out of the box” thinking it helped companies achieve a cloud-first, analytics-rich world of opportunities.
Additionally, because Model9 is easy to use and highly automated, it is much simpler for customers to accelerate data transformation projects. With Model9, movement to the cloud is fast, transformation in the cloud is easy, and the process is highly scalable.
The Team of Experts Leading Innovation
Gil Peleg as well as several other key technical people got their first exposure to mainframes at around age 18, during their service with the elite computer unit of the Israeli Defense Force. Having to deal with high scale mission critical issues and problem solving at such a young age paved their way to careers in companies such as IBM where they kept acquiring mainframe, storage and data management skills. The Model9 team today holds very deep enterprise knowledge in mainframe and data management. The combination of mainframe and cloud expertise allows it to quickly innovate robust cloud data management solutions for mainframe.
Paving the Way for Cloud Transformations
Model9 is a technology provider and also acts as a catalyst for change by delivering a rapid, easy-to-implement, and low-risk route to the cloud for mainframe data integration and management.
The dominant approach to this challenge is to embark on long, painful, and highly uncertain refactoring journeys. Model9 is the only company in the world offering a software-only solution to allow companies to quickly and easily copy their mission critical data to the cloud as a step off point to begin their migration projects.
With data accessible in the cloud, these companies can then test systems and concepts with low risk and see results quickly. From there, ‘data gravity’ will often complete the process by offering alternative, and often better, ways of working with data and by specifically transforming the data and adding it to data lakes and business intelligence or machine learning initiatives.
In short, Model9’s capability eliminates the requirement of rehosting or refactoring applications to get that data into the cloud. That provides the data feedstock needed to successfully implement business-relevant AI, machine learning, and business intelligence capabilities.
By eliminating silos and giving organizations maximum control over their mainframe data, Model9 accelerates cloud-first strategies now, while paving the way for entire cloud transformations in the future.
Embracing the Potential of Disruptive Technologies
Cloud computing is the great enabler of innovation. Developments in AI and ML that are being adopted most widely are cloud-based. For mainframe enterprises, participation in this creative explosion has been constrained by the challenges of getting mainframe data to a cloud destination in a compatible format. The challenge has been even greater where organizations rely on tape and virtual tape systems, the old low-cost standard for mass storage, as their key storage medium.
Today, decades’ worth of customer data is currently locked away, all but unusable in legacy storage systems. Model9 is liberating it and letting it provide its full ROI.
Taking the Right Steps to Innovate
Model9’s ability to innovate, developing uniquely powerful mainframe infrastructure modernization solutions, grows out of its fundamental team expertise in mainframe data management. This is why the company is trusted to be available in places like the AWS and Azure Marketplace, which enables cloud consumption models for the enterprise.
Model9 has a deep understanding of the pain points of customers and recognizes the complexity and cost associated with mainframe data management. The company also possesses a vision in which cloud and mainframe are seamlessly integrated. Model9’s Cloud Data Manager for Mainframe is built on these areas of expertise, enabling it to connect both worlds.
From its inception, the company has built relationships and formal partnerships with cloud providers, both hyperscale’s and private cloud operators, crafting joint solutions that bring the full vision into reality.
Leaving All the Obstacles Behind
According to the team at Model9, there is a lot of uncertainty around the best way to move the mainframe’s mission critical data into the cloud. Model9’s approach is so innovative that it can be hard to break through the attachment to the long-standing accepted ‘best practices’ that it has now rendered obsolete. But being a company of innovators, it is up to the challenge of bringing its new technology to market and demonstrating why it’s so much better than what came before. This is especially important when you consider that customers are especially careful when dealing with the core-business applications, that the company has improved its product to make these changes lower risk and significantly faster.
Model9’s vision is to migrate the mainframe’s critical data over to a cloud-first world, both for on-prem or public clouds, and it is committed to educating the market on what’s now possible.
Its partnerships have helped Model9 tremendously by complementing its capabilities and giving it an introduction to the companies they can help the most. But at the end of the day, Model9 always needs to demonstrate how exceptional its technology is and its unambiguous advantages, and also needs to display the solidity of the team and the business. The company has been very successful on all those points, but it takes work!
Achievements Earned with Hard Work
Model9 has received several awards and recognitions such as Gartner “Cool Vendor” which was earned in 2021. CIOReview named Model9 one of their Most Promising Storage Solution Companies for 2021 and Intellyx, an analyst firm focused on digital transformation, gave Model9 their 2021 Digital Innovator Award.
Model9 is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, an IBM Business Partner, and is a graduate of the IBM AlphaZone startup program. Recently, Model9 became a Microsoft Azure IP Co-Sell Partner and its Cloud Data Manager for Mainframe is available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
On the business side, Model9’s investors are some of the most respected venture firms in the world, including Intel Capital, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), StageOne, North First Ventures, and GlenRock.
Defining the Future
Model9 sees cloud transformation as the dominating paradigm of the time. In the enterprise world, the company doesn’t anticipate the extinction of the mainframe but rather its further integration into a cloud-centric world. Mainframes still have remarkable capabilities which, for certain enterprises, are hard to match in a pure public cloud environment. Rather, the ongoing and intimate alliance between the most superlative mainframe capabilities and the cutting-edge cloud will give enterprises flexibility, adaptability, and unbeatable business power that no other approach can provide.
Model9 intends to be leading this process, as both a thought leader and critical player for cloud providers and service providers helping enterprises adapt and for enterprises ready and eager to build a solid route to the cloud.
