Mainframes..reclaiming lost ground?
Sunday, September 20, 2009
I attended a SI partner meet hosted by IBM last week. It was interesting to see IBM’s aggressive stance on the mainframe machines.
One of their booths was titled “ The future runs on System Z!” :)
While a large majority of the IT universe (users, vendors and consultants) continue to wish away the mainframe predicting its demise anytime soon, the old veteran continues to survive.
It seems that IBM wants to leverage the powerful trends of virtualisation, cloud computing, and green technologies to restore the Mainframe machine to its lost glory and reclaim the ground it lost in the last 2 decades since the advent of desktop.
IBM is now steadily making investments and increasing its thrust on mainframe focussed computing and platforms.
It effectively controls the entire mainframe market with other playes either dead or reduced to marginal plays in limited geographies.
If this strategy works out, IBM would have taken the battle of enterprise computing to areas where it can frame the rules and carve out the battle ground to its advantage.
posted by Anirudh Joshi @ 11:02 PM,
2 Comments:
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At October 4, 2009 at 10:12 PM,
Pavan Soni said...
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When it comes to Innovation in the IT space, the first name that strikes is- International Business Machine.
IBM is one such firm that is literally the Father of the IT Industry and not only that it has invented many such things that are commonplace today, but also invented itself a few times. From Hardware to Software to Services and now to Service Science, the quest of innovation looks incessant for this 100 billion dollar giant. -
At October 7, 2009 at 6:55 AM,
dan_pac said...
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Hi Anirudh, I attended the Gartner datacentre 2009 event in London earlier this week.
At the mainframe session, Gartner presented IBM's positioning of the mainframe as at the heart of their cloud /future state architecture strategy.
The "sell" was that rather than replacing your existing IBM mainframe or adopting a wither on the vine approach to legacy apps, you actually use it to manage all of your UNIX and VM environments as well...sounds an expensive way to manage servers and maintain a healthy cash cow for IBM in customers datacentres!
