The difference may be that they're sticking with their own data center but they don't have a mainframe setup. Mainframes come with expensive, locked out hardware, expensive maintenance, expensive experts, you name it.
With modern open source tooling, ridiculously powerful graphics cards, easily accessible FPGAs and free data center hosting software like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and glusterfs you can replicate many of the features that made mainframes enticing many years ago.
It'll require a heck of a lot of work to get the same performance out of a custom built solution, but long term it's probably cheaper than relying on IBM.
I doubt that they'll be saving any money by moving to the cloud unless they're horribly inefficient with their contracts right now. Just moving away from mainframes alone should save a significant buck, but if they were planning on restructuring their digital infrastructure anyway then now is probably the best time.
With modern open source tooling, ridiculously powerful graphics cards, easily accessible FPGAs and free data center hosting software like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and glusterfs you can replicate many of the features that made mainframes enticing many years ago.
It'll require a heck of a lot of work to get the same performance out of a custom built solution, but long term it's probably cheaper than relying on IBM.
I doubt that they'll be saving any money by moving to the cloud unless they're horribly inefficient with their contracts right now. Just moving away from mainframes alone should save a significant buck, but if they were planning on restructuring their digital infrastructure anyway then now is probably the best time.