Gartner®

Market Guide for Mainframe and Legacy System Professional and Managed Services

The 2026 Gartner® Market Guide helps organizations identify value-added partners for handling their enterprise systems estate. It outlines five key use cases for legacy system service providers, from outsourcing and domain optimization to modernization and integration with cloud and hosting services. The report also notes that by 2030, the number of organizations relying on an MSP to handle mainframe workloads will increase by 30% compared to 2026 due to difficulties in finding mainframe professionals.

Damco Group is named a Representative Vendor for IBM iSeries / AS400 Services. As enterprises continue running mission-critical IBM i workloads with no viable migration path, Damco’s deep iSeries specialization directly addresses what Gartner identifies as the market’s core challenge: identify value-added partners for handling their enterprise systems estate.

Our key highlights from the report:

• By 2030, the number of organizations relying on an MSP to handle mainframe workloads will increase by 30% compared to 2026 due to difficulties in finding mainframe professionals.
• Many Gartner clients have expressed they have no intention of moving their core applications off mainframes and other legacy systems.
• In-platform optimization and hybrid cloud integration are where the market is moving
• Leading MSPs are expected to bring GenAI, DevOps, and modernization capabilities alongside core infrastructure support

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