Gartner Vice President and analyst Alessandro Galimberti (알레산드로 갈림베르티) said moving to IBM mainframes could be cheaper because of Broadcom's new subscription-focused licensing policy for VMware users, The Register reported on Sunday.

Galimberti said there are several cases where moving from VMware to IBM is a rational business case, as Broadcom requires customers to buy the entire Cloud Foundation private cloud stack, the report said. He was speaking in connection with his mid-April report, "The State of IBM Mainframes 2026."

He said he was surprised there were such cases.

He said mainframes have an advantage because the platform itself has data synchronisation and high availability built in, so developers do not need to implement them separately in application logic.

This is seen as particularly suitable for mission-critical applications that run for more than 10 years without major changes and for Linux-based applications. He said, "For companies running 500 to 700 Linux virtual machines, the IBM ecosystem is attractive."

AI workloads were also cited as an area mainframes can handle well. He said IBM recently showed mainframes are not a stagnant platform by upgrading the Spyre accelerator.

Galimberti said the perception that mainframes are in decline has persisted for decades. He said global systems integrators that pursued leaving mainframes had more failure cases than successes, and now recognise that and are stopping the departures.

Gartner forecast that by 2030, 75 percent of companies providing mainframe migration services will change direction or disappear. It expected that by 2030, companies that want mainframe migration will account for only 10 percent of the total.