What kind of dinosaurs show up for a conference on mainframes? How about Chris Maddern, architect of Venmo, the digital wallet app popular with millennials.

Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, bumped into Maddern at the IBM Machine Learning Launch Event in NYC.

“He was like, ‘Almost all the banks, airlines and retailers still run on mainframes in 2017 — and it’s growing. Who knew?'” Miniman recounted.

Miniman said the explanation for the mainframe’s stubborn persistence despite thick hype around public cloud lay in the pains of migration. He noted how conference attendee Barry Baker joked that by the time it takes to move business off the mainframe, the digital transformation window will have closed.

And of course, the security of mainframes is attractive to companies with valuable data.

In addition to that, IBM Corp. is sweetening the mainframe deal by adding cutting-edge AI and machine learning with its new z Systems announcement.

Still, Miniman conceded that most companies will not about-face from their current architecture in favor of mainframes even with baked-in AI.

“I didn’t hear anybody come in here and say, ‘Well, this offering is going to stay; well, let me dump x86 and go buy mainframe.’ That’s not the target that I heard here,” he clarified.

Watson’s weight loss plan

Co-host Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (pictured, right), gave his take on IBM’s z Systems announcement.

“Last week at Spark Summit, I talked to some of the users and some of the partners of the Watson Data Platform. They said, ‘It’s great. We love it, but it’s still a heavy lift. It still requires a fair amount of services,'” Vellante said.

He believes that IBM is whittling away at Watson’s unwieldiness by simplifying deployment and folding it into hardware like z Systems.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Machine Learning Launch Event 2017 NYC. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner at the conference. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE