Advancing Mainframe Momentum in the AI Era with IBM z17™
I’ve spent a long time working with IBM Z, long enough to have a healthy sense of what’s genuinely new versus what’s incremental. IBM z17™ feels genuinely new.
Not because of any single capability, but because of what the combination means: AI inference, built directly into the processor, running at mainframe speed and scale, on the most trusted enterprise platform in the industry. That changes what’s possible for you every day.
As you advance AI adoption strategies, the need for a trusted, secure, and high-performance platform has never been greater. IBM z17™ is purpose-built to unlock the full value of AI while maintaining the reliability, security, and scalability essential for mission-critical operations.
Accelerate Growth with AI at the Core
IBM z17™ helps you bring AI closer to mission-critical data and business processes, enabling:
- Faster business outcomes and fuel business growth
- Innovate with new agentic AI services and speed
- Modernize faster to free up development resources
By integrating AI directly into the core of the enterprise, you can move from experimentation to execution, transforming insights into measurable business value.
From where I sit, the most significant shift is the move from AI as a separate layer to AI as infrastructure. When inference runs on-chip at transaction speed, the architecture question changes entirely. You stop asking “how do we connect AI to our systems?” and start asking “what do we do with AI that’s already there?”
Transform Operations with End-to-End Automation
Operational efficiency remains a top priority if you’re seeking to maximize performance and agility. IBM z17™ helps you:
- Slash operational complexity
- Expedite insights and eliminate blind spots
- Get the most out of your investment
These capabilities enable you to improve productivity, increase responsiveness, and create a more resilient operational foundation for the future.
Automation on IBM Z has always been powerful. IBM z17™ takes it further by making it possible to automate decisions that previously required human review, not because the data wasn’t there, but because the processing speed wasn’t. That fundamentally changes the economics of back-office operations.
Protect Critical Data with Uncompromising Security
As cyber threats continue to evolve, organizations require a platform designed to safeguard sensitive data and maintain trust. IBM z17™ helps you:
- Strengthen cyber resilience
- Increase transparency to reduce risk
- Simplify security and compliance operations
By embedding security throughout the platform, IBM z17™ helps you protect critical workloads while supporting regulatory and business requirements.
Security on a mainframe has always been a strength. What IBM z17™ adds is transparency with the ability to demonstrate compliance, trace decisions, and surface risk in real time. For the customers Sapiens works with, many operating under strict regulation, and other demanding frameworks, that auditability is as important as the protection itself.
How Sapiens Helps Clients Innovate on IBM Z
At Sapiens, our relationship with IBM Z runs deep and it’s an active one. We don’t just support IBM Z; we build on it, continuously, alongside our customers.
Our eMerge platform is designed around one core idea: give development teams the speed and flexibility of modern tools, without abandoning the reliability and security of the mainframe. In practice, that means you can deliver new applications and regulatory frameworks faster than they ever could with traditional approaches.
A recent example illustrates this well. A government agency needed to implement a new regulatory framework quickly with a hard legislative deadline. The requirements were complex: registration and licensing workflows, integration with legacy systems and external data sources, digital citizen access, and full compliance with regulatory rules. Using eMerge on IBM Z, the team delivered the system ahead of schedule. The key factors:
- Rapid development: speed meant the legislative deadline wasn’t a constraint; the team had time to spare
- Embedded solution modeling: streamlining registration and licensing without building everything from scratch
- Automated technical complexity: the development team stayed focused on business logic, not infrastructure
- Integration without disruption: connecting to legacy systems and external data sources without rebuilding them
- Platform independence: creating and deploying across environments efficiently, with IBM Z as the reliable core
That’s what IBM Z and eMerge together make possible. IBM z17™ takes those capabilities and makes them faster, more efficient, and AI-ready.
“We don’t ask you to choose between innovation speed and operational stability. eMerge on IBM Z gives you both.”
Integrating IBM z17™ Capabilities into What We Build
We’re actively working with our customers to integrate, migrate, and implement solutions that take full advantage of what IBM z17™ brings. That work is happening now, not on a future roadmap.
The focus is on making IBM z17™’s AI inferencing capabilities available to eMerge-based applications without requiring our customers to manage the integration themselves. When you run on eMerge with IBM z17™, the platform does that work so your teams can focus on what the AI actually does for your business.
How AI Is Reshaping What Our Customers Need
Sapiens recently unveiled a new direction for how we deliver AI-powered solutions to insurers: built around the concept of hyper-relevance: the ability to put the right decision, for the right customer, in the right moment, every time.
That vision requires infrastructure that can act at the speed of a decision. It requires data that’s live, not stale. And it requires AI that’s embedded in the transaction, not sitting alongside it waiting to be consulted.
IBM z17™ is the infrastructure answer to that challenge. The Telum II™ processor’s integrated AI accelerators mean inference happens where the data lives – on the mainframe, inside the transaction – rather than in a separate AI layer with its own latency, its own data movement costs, and its own failure points.
Our customers are already asking how to get AI into their core operations without compromising the reliability they depend on. IBM z17™ and eMerge together give us a clear answer.
What Sapiens Brings to IBM Z Customers
There are a few things we’ve built over decades of IBM Z work that are genuinely hard to replicate:
- Deep platform knowledge: we know how IBM Z behaves under load, in production, with real regulatory constraints. That knowledge is embedded in how we design eMerge.
- Continuous investment: we track IBM Z releases and update eMerge accordingly. Our customers don’t need to manage the gap between IBM Z capability and application readiness.
- A proven delivery approach: from rapid implementation to full modernization, we’ve done this across government, insurance, and financial services in more than 30 countries.
Why IBM z17™ Matters to Our Shared Customers
IBM z17™ is the platform that makes AI-native enterprise operations practical at scale. If you’re already running on IBM Z, it means the infrastructure you trust becomes meaningfully more capable without disruption, without migration, without risk.
Together with IBM Z, Sapiens remains focused on helping you fully capitalize on the AI era while preserving the reliability, scalability, and trust that define the mainframe. We’re committed to helping you turn today’s investments into a sustained competitive advantage, driving long-term value in an increasingly digital world.
“The organizations that will lead in the AI era aren’t the ones that bolt AI onto existing systems. They’re the ones that build it into their core. IBM z17™ and eMerge make that possible today.”
Performance Disclaimers
* ** 5.6x fewer cores / 450 billion inference operations: Performance results are based on IBM® internal tests running on IBM Systems Hardware of machine type 9175. The MegaCard benchmark was containerized and deployed on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform (RHOCP) 4.17 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 9.4 with KVM. Compared x86 Server Hardware configuration: 28 Sapphire Rapids Intel® Xeon® Gold CPUs @ 2.20 GHz with Hyper-Threading turned on, 1 TB memory. The 450 billion inference operations benchmark was executed with 1 thread performing local inference operations using a LSTM based synthetic credit card fraud detection model to exploit the Integrated Accelerator for AI. A batch size of 160 was used. IBM Systems Hardware configuration: 1 LPAR running Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 9.4 with 6 IFLs (SMT), 128 GB memory. 1 LPAR with 2 CPs, 4 zIIPs and 256 GB memory running IBM z/OS® 3.1 with IBM z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) feature. Results may vary.
