Far longer ago than I care to admit, I had a job teaching German to college students as a graduate teaching assistant. Aside from helping me earn a paycheck and offsetting my tuition payments, that TA position provided a powerful life lesson that has stayed with me. Sometimes, the best way to learn really something is to try and teach it to someone else.

That lesson came full circle in recent weeks, as I joined several of my LRS colleagues on the 2025 Mainframe Tour of Illinois, organized by IT firm Team SWAMI and a gifted speaker from IBM. Over the course of four evenings on university campuses, more than 350 attendees (including myself) learned everything the latest IBM mainframe hardware had to offer, including quantum encryption and providing the horsepower to handle cloud computing. Cloud computing and mainframes? Hmmmm…

After the fact-packed presentations, as students stopped by to talk to LRS and other IT vendors, we fielded lots of questions about how mainframes work and what makes the IBM Z environment different than other platforms. In trying to explain it to them, I found myself repeating concepts I had used to explain mainframes to myself during my first FORTRAN class in the 1980s.

Unlike the personal computers I had grown up with, a mainframe system does not provide each user individual computer assets to use and manage on their own. Instead, a user sits in front of a relatively “dumb” terminal and keyboard, connected via a network to a VERY powerful centralized computer, the resources of which are shared among the many other users and programs simultaneously working on that mainframe.

From the very first time I heard about cloud computing, I understood it in the same way. “The cloud” is an extremely powerful computing resource that can be accessed remotely using clients as modest as a mobile phone, Chromebook, thin client, or other endpoint. The results of this powerful centralized processing are returned to the endpoint so it can be viewed, printed, or acted upon by the end user.

As one my more knowledgeable LRS colleague Sam Cohen recently explained it:

“Cloud is somebody else’s computer. That’s all it’s ever been. Back in the 50’s, back in the 70’s, back in all of this time. You sat at a terminal—it’s a workstation, it’s a user interface—and it’s somebody else’s computer. Your IT department’s, your central operations, maybe your company’s, maybe your school had a central machine… But it was always somebody else’s computer.”

Sam was describing the mainframe of the past. And the cloud of the future. And the past, present, and future of enterprise computing. All in a way that a generation more acquainted with PCs and server farms can easily comprehend. Using the analogy of transportation, Sam compared a PC to an automobile. “The problem with these machines (PCs) is it’s sort of like having a car. You have to take care of it… You try to have the car not break down by doing routine maintenance, but if you didn’t have a car, you wouldn’t have the routine maintenance. So, when it’s somebody else’s machine, that can save an awful lot of issues.”

Perhaps this analogy explains the recent interest in migrating applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud. By moving processing to “somebody else’s machine,” companies can eliminate much of the expense related to physical servers, networks, load balancers, and the administrators needed to implement and manage them. Instead, companies can negotiate a contract for only the computing resources they need to support critical business processes and let someone else worry about how to provide them.

While there are pros and cons to both on-premise and cloud-based computing environments, one thing is for sure: both are here to stay. Just as client-server applications and open systems hardware did not eliminate the mainframe, the trend toward cloud computing will not make corporate data centers obsolete. Likewise, since applications will still need to run in all of these environments, LRS output management software will continue to support an “all of the above” approach.

In coming weeks, you will be hearing more about cloud-based LRS solutions that provide the same level of control, reliability, security, and assured document delivery as our open systems software and our mainframe solutions before them. But we have not and will not waiver from our mission to provide solutions that let organizations deliver any document in any format from any application on any platform—from mainframe to mobile to cloud—in a reliable, secure, and fully auditable manner.