The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Technology: Mainframes and Innovation — Two Concepts that don't need to be Mutually Exclusive
Mainframes? Other than for competitions between nations and multinationals to see who can build the fastest super-computer in the world, do people really still use “big iron” mainframes? IBM has been trying to convince people for years that the death of mainframes is highly exaggerated. But really?
Rodney C. Adkins, IBM’s senior vice president for systems and technology, for example, told the New York Times that “The mainframe is the most flexible technology platform in computing.” In August 2012, IBM rolled out the most recent of a long line of mainframe technology, a new computer that culminates three years and $1 billion of research.
Mark Combs, senior vice president for mainframe at CA Technologies, said that “The mainframe continues to be a strategic platform that delivers the flexibility, scalability and security needed to meet new service demands and business priorities.”
Tim Grieser, VP of System Management Software Research at IDC, said that “The mainframe continues to stand out as a secure, reliable, efficient and highly scalable platform for mission critical applications and databases.”
CA Technologies recently did a study that surveyed IT managers and found, perhaps surprisingly, that nearly three-quarters of them (72 percent) say that the mainframe is a very strategic or highly strategic part of their IT plans. 37 percent say that they’re going to increase the spend on their mainframe software over the next 12-18 months. The report finds that mainframe is now actually viewed as an enabler of innovation.
How can this be? A report from BMC Software cites the following reasons why people may be taking a second look at mainframes:
- 93 percent of IT departments expect mainframe usage to remain constant or increase going forward
- 62 percent expect their mainframe capacity to increase in the coming year
- 47 percent say that new workloads and business applications are driving their usage of mainframes
- 60 percent say that using mainframes, while expensive up-front purchases, actually help them keep costs down
Business Management magazine talks about a ‘come back’ for mainframes and thinks that we’re at the start of a sort of mainframe renaissance. Some people also see a strong analogy between cloud and mainframe computing.
Dele Oladapo, for example, VP of Cross-Platform Engineering at Prudential Insurance, told Business Management magazine that “If you look at the client/server paradigm, that represented a shift away from the mainframe model because you wanted to be able to give each of the application owners more decision-making power over what they wanted to do. But if you look at virtualization and the cloud, it’s much more about going back to a mainframe paradigm where you have resources that you just carve up within virtual images, offering that back up to the end-user so that they can be abstracted from infrastructure decisions and just focus on their business objectives. In Fortune 500 companies, you’re typically going to see all three of those platforms – mainframe, distributed and virtualized – and cross-platform interoperability is where the challenge comes from.”
