Brenesh Stanslas Flower Mary presented a talk at the Distributed SQL Summit 2020 titled "Monolith to Microservices" where he demonstrated how to modernize a large, intertwined mainframe monolith into microservices using a practical approach with Wipro's "moderniZ" platform. Mainframes pose challenges such as limited tooling and difficulty finding skilled developers and administrators, making it hard for organizations to roll out new features in a timely manner. However, this also creates a massive opportunity for modernization given the widespread adoption of mainframes by top companies and their significant transaction volume. To modernize a mainframe application, Brenesh suggested using a distributed SQL database like YugabyteDB and considering other factors such as transcoding code, migrating data, identifying good candidates for microservices, refactoring services into APIs, building new UIs, creating a develop and test environment, and targeting the desired environment like Kubernetes or cloud providers. The "moderniZ" platform was demonstrated to successfully navigate these considerations and modernize a legacy mainframe application into a microservices-based one ready for the cloud.