Making the case for the mainframe
Published: 26 Aug 2008 15:41 BST
...find it difficult to recruit expertise in fields such as legacy application management and systems-management disciplines such as capacity planning.
Marc Lillycrop, managing director of consultancy Arcati, indicates that the skills shortage may be somewhat "overstated" today. However, he warns that in the future there is "potentially always going to be a problem with older skills as there aren't enough education processes around to replenish them and people aren't necessarily rushing to go into it".
It's the top end of the mid-market up to large multinationals, those that have traditionally used AS/400s and Unix, where it's going to be interesting
Roy Illsley, Butler Group
IBM has been attempting to rectify this situation since 2004, by hooking up with academic establishments worldwide as part of its Academic Initiative. The vendor now has 400 colleges and universities actively teaching and developing mainframe courses and accredited certificates, which has led to almost 50,000 students being trained in this area. But existing issues mean the mainframe is unlikely to take over the world again any time soon, as much as IBM's Neilson might like to convince the market that "the trend towards distributed systems went too far and is now swinging back towards centralisation".
While Phelps acknowledges that 93 percent of those surveyed at a recent Gartner conference indicated they were consolidating or planned to consolidate their x86 servers, mainframes were not the only environment under consideration, with high-end Unix boxes also being in play. Therefore, although the market is growing, such growth is likely to remain "slow and steady" rather than meteoric, although green IT considerations and "more focus on things like SAP may result in some up-tick", Phelps says.
Balancing out
While some sites are sticking with mainframes or becoming first-time users, others are migrating away, evening the picture out. As Lillycrop explains: "There's continued relatively healthy growth at the top end where larger users are tied to the platform due to a heavy investment in resources and proprietary applications, but lower down the scale where people are less entrenched, it's much more imbalanced and can go either way."
The downside for the mainframe here is that customers at this level often prefer an environment that costs less upfront in hardware and software terms — a factor that can act as a strong deterrent — particularly as there is a widespread perception at the upper management level that the mainframe is old-fashioned and dying. Moreover, the growth in new systems adoption is coming more from developing economies such as India, China and Eastern Europe than western countries such as the UK, where the mainframes' heartlands remain financial services companies, large retailers, government and defence.
That is not to say that the mainframe should be written off any time soon. "It's the top end of the mid-market up to large multinationals, those that have traditionally used AS/400s (now called iSeries) and Unix, where it's going to be interesting. The mainframe is coming down to that space and midrange servers are going up, so that's where the battle for hearts and minds is likely to be," concludes Illsley.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
36 out of 36 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
