IBM in court bid to shut down Software-Defined Mainframe threat to its 'big iron' gravy train

IBM claims that LzLabs’ IBM-compatible mainframe-in-the-cloud infringes its intellectual property rights

IBM is in court this week in a bid to shutdown an IBM-compatible cloud service that, it claims, infringes on its own mainframe intellectual property.

IBM argues that Zurich, Switzerland-based LzLabs unlawfully reverse-engineered its proprietary mainframe software in order to develop what it calls the Software-Defined Mainframe (SDM) – a technology enabling organisations to run IBM mainframe applications on open-source computing platforms, such as Linux in the cloud.

SDM was originally released in June 2016 following a decade of development. A number of tools, utilities and services were subsequently released to help customers their applications from IBM mainframes to modern computing environments without having to recompile the application.

IBM filed suit in March 2022.

"The SDM is a thin compatibility layer for customer applications originally built for execution on IBM mainframes. The SDM implements a compatible interface intended to enable the customer applications to be interoperable with current computing environments, such as Linux, x86, ARM and the cloud, without the customer applications having to be re-written and/or recompiled," according to LzLabs' Defence and Counterclaim document filed in the High Court.

LzLabs claims that its technology could free captive IBM users from the high costs of purchasing and running IBM mainframe hardware, software and services, offering them the possibility of running their IBM mainframe applications as a cloud service on commodity hardware instead.

IBM UK is suing LzLabs, its UK subsidiary that conducted the testing, and even key individuals associated with LzLabs, demanding that they withdraw SDM from the market.

However, LzLabs claims that it legitimately observed, studied and tested how customer applications interact with mainframes, and said that IBM has failed to provide evidence of any wrongdoing.

In its Defence document, LzLabs claims that IBM has failed to identify "any specific COBOL and PL/1 binary modules, data blocks and code fragments, IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS) and IBM Management System (IMS) binary modules and code fragments" that the company might have infringed.

LzLabs and its lawyers believe that British and European law is on its side, citing the EU Software Directive of 1991, most recently updated in May 2009. This remains codified in UK law, post-Brexit. This Directive harmonised software copyright laws across the EU, protecting software as a "literary work" under copyright law under the Berne Convention, but with a series of limitations to protect both users and promote competition.

Moreover, it wouldn't be the first IBM-compatible system. Amdahl, National Semiconductor, Hitachi Data Systems and RCA all produced IBM compatible mainframes from the late 1960s. However, two of these vendors have fallen by the wayside, while National Semiconductor sold off its mainframe unit in 1989, and Hitachi withdrew from the mainframe hardware market in 2017.

IBM is gunning for a decision in the High Court in London as it is the venue of choice for international business disputes. A win in London would put LzLabs on the back foot in its legal battle across Europe, and add leverage to any claim that IBM might make in the US courts.

Tens of thousands of organisations in both the public and private sectors are tied to the IBM mainframe ecosystem in order to run a plethora of legacy applications that cannot easily be migrated to alternative platforms.

Many organisations therefore face an invidious conundrum.

On the one hand, the skills required to maintain legacy mainframe code have long fallen out of favour, and skilled staff are therefore reaching retirement age with no cohort following on to replace them. But, on the other hand, the cost and risk of rewriting or recompiling the software on which an entire organisation is dependent is invariably too high to even contemplate the long march to a new platform.

"This is hardly the first case of a tech giant butting up against competition law, but is one of the few to proceed all the way through to trial. Regulators around the world – and the industry – will be watching closely," according to Computing editor Tom Allen.