The overnight work has wandered into the working day. At a large mainframe customer served by FNTS, batch processing was competing with incoming online transactions, slowing responses. Growing demand from mobile and web users had made an old scheduling arrangement uncomfortable. The machine still had a job. Its operating arrangements needed attention.
FNTS brought in SVA Software and its z/INSIGHT analysis tools. Together, the teams examined bottlenecks, restructured online and batch environments, and adjusted capacity settings. SVA’s account says month-end processing fell by several hours. FNTS chief technology officer Ken Marr reported fewer abnormal job endings and consistent achievement of service targets. In ordinary English: fewer abnormal job endings, more work finished on time.
That episode makes a useful introduction to FNTS. The Omaha company sells the expertise and operating capacity to keep complicated enterprise computing useful. Mainframes, IBM Power systems and private clouds sit alongside newer infrastructure in its portfolio. Its customers have businesses to run while the technology changes underneath them.
The cloud has a banking family tree
FNTS belongs to First National of Nebraska, the banking holding company. That connection helps explain its chosen market: organizations accustomed to scrutiny, sensitive information and consequences when systems stop working. Financial services, healthcare, insurance and government feature prominently in its description of the customers it serves.
The business began in 1995 in Bellevue, Nebraska, with fewer than 15 employees. Early assignments included bank networks, Novell-to-Windows conversions and the move from Token Ring to Ethernet. In the early 2000s, its virtualization offering carried the pleasingly literal name Server-by-the-Slice. Enterprise computing occasionally permits itself a decent menu.
Today’s offering is broader, but the commercial logic remains recognizable. An organization can buy specialist help with infrastructure that its own team has to support every day. FNTS lists Metropolitan Utilities District among its customer relationships and advertises roughly 200 clients across its services. These are institutional purchases, shaped by operating requirements and procurement decisions.
Whittaker’s tenure spans several of those changes. First National Technology Solutions shortened its public identity to FNTS in 2018, introducing a new website and brand. The name became smaller as the service catalog grew. By its thirtieth anniversary in 2025, the company reported 130 employees.
Keep the code. Change the arrangement.
The center of the offer is a distinction buyers can easily miss: moving responsibility for a computer is different from replacing the applications that run on it. FNTS Cloud for Mainframe supports IBM Z environments through hosting, remote management, optimization and security services. A customer can retain important pieces of control or hand over more of the operating work.
Its mainframe service framework has three levels. Infrastructure-only support leaves system-level control with the customer. Partial management adds selected operational responsibilities. Fully managed Mainframe-as-a-Service brings hosting and broader administration into a subscription arrangement. The exact boundary matters more than the acronym: someone must own patching, databases, job scheduling and the response when a problem arrives.
- 01 / InfrastructureHosted capacity; retain system control.
- 02 / Partial managementAdd agreed operating responsibilities.
- 03 / Fully managedBring hosting and operations together.
Conceptual view of FNTS’s mainframe tiers. Contract scope defines the handoff.
The value is partly organizational. A company may have sound applications but need more coverage for the systems underneath them. FNTS offers around-the-clock monitoring and support, with U.S.-based operations. Remote management also allows it to work with customer environments without making a hosting move the starting requirement.
That gives FNTS a place between a hardware purchase and a sweeping transformation program. It can supply an operating team around an existing estate. For a buyer, the practical question becomes which responsibilities are consuming scarce internal attention, and which ones should stay close to the people who understand the business.
Three verbs, three different bills
FNTS organizes modernization around rehosting, refactoring and replatforming. Rehosting moves existing workloads into a different operating environment while retaining application code. Refactoring changes that code. Replatforming moves converted applications and data onto a different platform. Those choices carry different amounts of engineering work, testing and organizational disruption.
The company markets average annual savings of 15 to 20 percent from mainframe rehosting. Treat that as a provider’s stated outcome range, with a particular starting estate behind every result. It is not a quoted price for a new customer. The useful comparison is the whole operating bill: software, infrastructure, staffing, migration effort and the service obligations attached to each option.
A separate product makes the software portion explicit. Launched in September 2025, Passport-as-a-Service combines IBM Passport Advantage licensing, cloud and managed infrastructure support under an annual cost structure. It targets x86 and Power workloads requiring IBM software licenses, and includes entitlement tracking and lifecycle administration.
That packaging addresses a less photogenic part of IT: knowing what the organization is entitled to run, which agreements are coming up for renewal and how the software estate should change. An infrastructure decision can look attractive until its licensing consequences arrive. FNTS makes those commercial details part of the service conversation.
The first thing to fix may be the timetable
The SVA customer example offers a smaller, more reproducible lesson than a wholesale migration story. The visible failure was competition for processing resources as overnight work overlapped with daytime demand. Detailed performance analysis then guided changes to workload organization and capacity. It is a case for diagnosis before committing to a larger intervention.
A buyer can copy that sequence: define the business symptom, establish when it occurs, examine the competing workloads and measure the effect of a targeted change. That is an inference from the case, rather than a guarantee about another environment. Better scheduling cannot, by itself, repair an application whose underlying business logic needs replacing.
“the client reduced its abends and consistently met SLA goals.”Ken Marr, FNTS CTO, in SVA Software’s customer account
FNTS’s separate continuity portfolio addresses another operating problem: getting back to work after disruption. Its services include disaster recovery, immutable backups, encryption, retention policies and mainframe cyber resiliency. The company describes recovery testing, runbooks and support across IBM Z, Power, VMware and Azure environments.
For the customer, that makes recovery a set of operating tasks to specify and rehearse. A backup copy and a usable recovery process answer different questions. Buyers still need recovery objectives that reflect their own business, plus a clear agreement about testing and execution. Outsourcing work makes the allocation of responsibility more consequential.
A specialist with some very large neighbors
FNTS’s partnerships show how it reaches beyond its own workforce. IBM is central: the company became a delivery partner in 2004 and a Platinum Partner in 2025. Its wider technology relationships include BMC, Broadcom, Microsoft and Dell Technologies. Those relationships connect operating services to the products customers already use.
Large services firms also appear in the network. Accenture refers mainframe work, while Capgemini works with FNTS as a Mainframe-as-a-Service provider. Kyndryl has a disaster recovery alliance with the company. The market therefore resists a tidy competitors list: an infrastructure firm can be an alternative on one assignment and a route to business on another.
FNTS’s distinction is this combination of platform specialization, regulated-industry focus and selectable management levels. Enterprises can also retain operations internally or assemble cloud and consulting services themselves. The FNTS proposition is most relevant when coordinating that work is itself a burden. A small business needing a simple website has little reason to buy this much machinery.
The next move is more choice in the machine room
Recent announcements extend that positioning. In December 2025, FNTS described its hybrid cloud offering as a way to coordinate mainframe, Power, distributed systems and public cloud workloads. Placement depends on cost, performance and compliance requirements. The idea is to manage a mixed estate as a connected operating environment.
In April 2026, it added a Nutanix-powered private cloud option to FNTS Cloud for Distributed Systems. The offering supports virtual machines, containerized applications and hybrid environments. Nutanix brings compute, storage, networking and virtualization into a software-defined architecture, including its AHV hypervisor. FNTS supplies the managed service around it.
That addition gives customers another virtualization route while preserving the company’s role as operator. FNTS linked the launch to enterprises reassessing infrastructure choices amid changing market conditions. The announcement describes an expanded choice; it does not establish that every customer should migrate to it.
The company’s January 2026 roadmap reported approximately 15 percent revenue growth for 2025 and set a roughly 20 percent growth target for 2026. The latter remains a target. It also outlined plans for IBM AI tools in operations, application health and automation. Those plans sit alongside the everyday work of keeping existing systems dependable.
In April, FNTS reported renewed ISG Leader recognition for Mainframe-as-a-Service in the U.S. and U.S. public sector, plus Rising Star recognition in U.S. mainframe technology consulting. The direction is clear enough: operate the installed systems, improve them and earn more of the advice surrounding them. The mainframe stays in the picture because the work it does still matters to the customer.