The TMF modernized the U.S. Department of Agriculture's specialty crops inspection system that ensures safe food reaches school lunches and military rations, eliminating paper-based processes and saving $1.72 million annually while inspectors now use tablets instead of clipboards to process over 60 billion pounds of produce.
The fact that some companies are not planning to switch to S/4HANA until 2030 does not mean that they will wait until then to make the switch. Rather, they simply need this time due to the complexity of their system landscapes. I see this as a reflection of the reality in IT departments. Skills shortages, parallel transformation projects, and limited budgets are also causing schedules to be pushed back.
The most violent move came in a single session when Anthropic announced that its Claude Code tool is positioned as an ideal solution for code modernization, including COBOL legacy system work. That announcement hit IBM where it hurts most. A significant portion of IBM's consulting revenue comes from exactly that kind of work: helping large enterprises modernize aging mainframe and legacy codebases.