Vaneet Grewal

Where it all started

Straight out of school, Vaneet took a role as a software engineer at Goldman Sachs, one of the largest investment banks in the world. His first foray into mainframe was working to modernize, stabilize, and secure their payment environment. This experience helped build his mainframe skills on the infrastructure side as well as the programming side, specifically COBOL. Vaneet went on to spend more than 15 years in banking and capital markets in various engineering and leadership roles across Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York Mellon, and Bank of America. Five years ago, Vaneet parlayed this experience into a career in FinTech, where he now leads a sales organization at OvationCXM selling SaaS into financial services organizations and collaborating with partners like IBM.

He says there are three different ways that people come into the industry: “Students new to the IT industry as a whole; folks that are looking to either change their career or add a set of skills to their resume; and then you’ve got those, very similar to myself, where the environment caused them to become an expert in a platform that they never really envisaged that they’d be working in.”

AI and IBM Z® – the perfect match

“Some of the technologies that really excite me in the mainframe space are things like AI inferencing, being able to work within the mainframe with data that sits safely and securely in the mainframe, and being able to apply these highly scaled inferencing techniques,” says Vaneet.

Vaneet primarily works with banks, and their crown jewels are the customer data that sits within the mainframe platform. In the past, banks had to extract that data and move it somewhere, creating redundancy and risk. With on-chip AI inferencing available on the latest generation mainframes, companies are now able to co-locate AI with mission-critical data to enable data analysis to happen right where the data is located. This enables banks to harness on-chip AI acceleration and run inferencing for high-volume workloads at scale and low latency. Banks are able to work with their most sensitive data such as accounts, transactions, positions, and subledgers, all within the advanced security of the mainframe, which has built-in encryption and quantum-safe technology that secures their critical workloads. And they’re able to bring together applications that sit in the cloud within their mainframe environment, delivering unmatched speed and massive scale.

Harnessing the power of the mainframe

The mainframe is a powerhouse for high-volume, mission-critical workloads, especially in regulated industries. The mainframe continues to deliver 99.99999% uptime—greater than Six Sigma—all while processing massive workloads day in and day out. It’s why 45 of the world’s top 50 banks value the mainframe’s highly secured platform for running their most mission-critical workloads. OvationCXM’s platform, for example, uses the mainframe as the engine for orchestrating frictionless customer journeys.

“The bottom line is that the mainframe has become incredibly adaptable,” says Vaneet. Enterprises can run AI workloads in place right on the mainframe. Customer data stays where it belongs—eliminating worries about data breaches or privacy risks. Now, AI can be applied to analyze and provide insights in groundbreaking new ways with the security of the mainframe platform it’s running on.

Pursuing mainframe as a career

There is strong demand in the global job market for mainframe talent. “We’re in a unique era of hybrid infrastructure where cloud and mainframe must coexist and complement each other,” says Vaneet. “This creates a high demand for professionals with a deep understanding of both platforms, and those that have it will be highly valuable in the market.”

For those interested in a career in mainframe, Vaneet recommends leveraging the global community of mainframe professionals, partners, champions, and peers. More structured training and material are available in the IBM Z Xplore platform. “IBM Z Xplore is a journey, really, a set of tools and capabilities that allow you to skill up, get the right education. It’s fully backed by an amazing community, a community of thousands of folks who are involved in the modern mainframe on a day-to-day basis.”

Delivering frictionless, AI-powered customer journeys

Vaneet explains that OvationCXM is a no-code customer journey and customer experience orchestration platform. OneView is their collaborative solution that gives banks capabilities they’ve wanted for a long time: a household, enterprise-view of a customer in real-time that crosses lines of business, core systems, and disconnected platforms. The OneView solution enables precise segmentation, so banks can personalize every interaction as well as product and pricing offers, by individual or cohort.

OneView’s localized AI inference capabilities empower banks to perform sophisticated analysis of this rich customer data directly on the mainframe. AI can access a bank’s data stores to identify trends, uncover opportunities, and offer data-driven recommendations within the highly advanced security guardrails of the mainframe. It’s a game-changing solution that helps banks deliver more personalized experiences, improve customer satisfaction, enhance their overall operations, drive revenue growth, and remain competitive in today’s market.

Community: The recipe for success

“IBM Z and LinuxONE Community is paramount. A lot of people are trying to solve similar problems using a stack of technologies like data integration technologies and AI inferencing platforms—and trying to do that on the modern mainframe.” Vaneet says that tapping into the vast, global community was vital to the success of OvationCXM, providing essential resources, blogs, and connections with deeply technical mainframers sharing best practices.