VirtualZ Computing Raises $4.9 Million to Enable Enterprise Innovation With Mainframe Data Through Out-of-the-Box, Bi-Directional Access from Hybrid Cloud

VirtualZ Computing, which provides an out-of-the-box solution to connect mainframes to hybrid cloud for bi-directional data access, announced that it has raised $2.2 million in seed financing led by Next Frontier Capital. Additional investors include 2M Companies, Innosphere Ventures, and Next Coast Ventures. Including prior funding, VirtualZ has raised $4.9 million to date.

A significant number of large enterprises store as much as 70% of critical business data on IBM Z platforms, and large enterprises rely on them because of their unparalleled reliability, stability, security and scalability. But accessing this data is extremely difficult. Enterprises spend millions of dollars in custom code to extract, transform and replicate data copies from mainframes to hybrid cloud or distributed storage. Data is moved at arbitrary intervals for hundreds of applications, anywhere from twice a week for some applications up once an hour for others.

Additionally, enterprises cannot just move portions of the data. It requires moving all of the data, which is a resource intensive, time-consuming process that can consume up to 40% of the mainframe’s capacity.

Data is always out of sync between the mainframe and applications in other environments, which creates a bottleneck for innovation and weakens security because multiple copies of critical and sensitive data are being moved around all the time. Also, insurance and financial services companies must tell customers that it may take 24-48 hours for account changes to be reflected in online, customer-facing applications.

VirtualZ’s Mainframe Data Access Solution

VirtualZ, which is the only woman-founded mainframe software company in history, has one solution already available, with two others soon to follow:

Lozen: This solution, which is available now, enables hybrid cloud, SaaS, distributed and custom applications to gain real-time, read-write access to mainframe data out of the box. Data isn’t moved; instead, all apps share the data equally as a peer with mainframe applications. The solution installs in minutes and runs on the zIIP engine, consuming a fraction of the capacity of a general processor.

With Lozen, enterprises the freedom to innovate with data on the mainframe and the applications that leverage it. The solution strengthens security posture by keeping a single source of truth securely and safely on the mainframe, and it eliminates the expensive and time-consuming process of moving copies of data.

Zaac: This solution provides mainframe applications with real-time, read-write access to external data out of the box, including hybrid cloud, physical storage and SaaS. It provides all of the benefits of Lozen and will be available in Q1 2024.

PropelZ: This utility, which is also available now, makes it simple to create a copy of mainframe data whenever needed for experimentation or analysis in hybrid cloud environments. This capability enables organizations to push a one-time copy of mainframe data for just a fraction of the cost of legacy ETL solutions, and it is ideal for use cases that don’t require real-time read-write access.

With VirtualZ, when data is updated on the mainframe, that data becomes a single source of truth. As a result:

• Customers don’t need to wait for 24-48 hours to see changes reflected, which improves the customer experience.
• Enterprises avoid losses that stem from insurance agents, inventory managers and other decision makers who are working off of stale data.
• Organizations increase their efficiency, quality of service and profitability.

Will Price, Founder and General Partner, Next Frontier Capital:

“VirtualZ’s founder and CEO, Jeanne Glass, explained how her company solved the mainframe data access problem, I knew this was an investment we needed to make. It’s an elegant solution to an enormous problem, because so much vital business data resides on the mainframe. Without VirtualZ, it’s cumbersome, slow and expensive to access.”

Jeanne Glass, CEO and co-founder, VirtualZ:

“With this new capital, we are building out a sales team and expanding our development capabilities. We intend to achieve first revenue quickly I saw first-hand the immensity of the mainframe data problem when I was head of worldwide client relations at CA Technologies, so we know there’s strong demand for a solution, and we want to ensure we have everything in place now to support the rapid growth we expect to see.”