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SaaS: Mainframes Take on the Clouds
While cloud computing from on-Demand vendors like Salesforce, Amazon, NetSuite, Google and others are all the range, IBM is challenging the idea. IBM contends that on-Demand can’t adequately address issues like reliability, security, auditing, privacy, data integrity, and automation.
IBM thinks that the weaknesses on-Demand are the same areas where mainframes shine.
Compared to an architecture of complex meshes with clustered and interdependent servers, IBM is positioning mainframes as a simpler and easier to manage solution.
IBM is drinking their own koolaid. Internally, IBM is migrating 3900 servers to 33 mainframes in a project slated to be completed by the end of 2009.
The goal for the migration is to create a simpler system to administer, and one that is also more energy and cost efficient.
Steve Mills, IBM’s software czar, rather than embarassed from selling aging hardware, boasts of the 40 year history of IBM’s mainframe and its flagship MVS operating system.
He described mainframe technology as a “40-year-old tour de force” that is packed with preventive code built up over decades that “fights like mad to keep machines running with extremely high reliability.”
Mills went on to say that IBM’s “corporate buyers are running mission critical apps, and they are not going to pick up their businesses and take them to some amorphous and ill-defined data center. The cloud as some amorphous concept that meets all needs and requirements is science fiction.”
Mills says that IBM’s software strategy is not to be creating business applications, but to focus on the infrastructure needs of businesses rather than
competing with their partners who build the applications.
IBM’s approach is one that definitely has merit and makes sense especially for large enterprises.
But it’s not the only one. Cloud will prove to be a strong competitor to the mainframe and is likely to make inroads into the largest organizations.
