Mainframe skills started becoming a recognized requirement about three to five years ago, said Robert Bird, IBM Systems z platform leader for Canada.

"Our customers were asking us what we could do to assist them within their own skills programs and HR recruiting for that area of their business and that was fundamentally what drove this IBM Academic Initiative for Systems z program," he said.READ MOREWild tales of AS/400 survival

Not only are customers continuing to add and extend existing applications and services, but IBM is attracting new customers who are attracted to the economics of scale that the mainframe platform provides to an organization, said Bird.

"We do have customers that are incorporating for the first time mainframes within their organizations, so we have incremental requirements there and some of our customers are on a very large growth curve where over time they are hiring additional staff to address that growth," he said.

Mainframe specialists are also on the IT "it" list due to upcoming demographics trends.