UK: Mainframes are the legacy platforms of yesteryear when it comes to business intelligence (BI). Or are they? Cognos announced last month that its BI software will be available on the IBM System z mainframe running Linux.

Mainframes are dead; long live the mainframe
"Not so. Trusty mainframes are alive and kicking and remain critical components of a company's IT infrastructure, especially for mission-critical high-volume transactional environments, like financial services, where the mainframe has proven itself to be a trusted platform for housing large amounts of data in a secure and centrally managed environment."

"Research shows that mainframe revenues are rising and MIPS capacity is at an all-time high. We suspect that much of this growth is coming from existing mainframe users who are either upgrading or growing their mainframe usage. At the same time vendors are becoming sensitive to the cost and introducing new pricing strategies to make it more cost-effective on both the hardware and software fronts that extend its reach to companies that once felt priced out. The resurgence in interest in mainframe is also partly due to companies moving to consolidate their IT infrastructures. Mainframe systems like IBM's System z, with its large capacity, are good consolidation tools."

"Since BI applications are growing in terms of data volume and performance, these are points not lost on vendors like IBM/Cognos and SAS Institute, both of whom continue to invest significant development dollars on this platform. For mainframe vendors in it for the long haul, like IBM, the challenge is to sell the mainframe into new customers/applications. BI can help them to do that."

"However, many BI vendors have simply given up the ghost when it comes to extending their reach to the mainframe. By doing so we believe they're missing out on an opportunity. They should think again. We believe there are several benefits to be had by putting BI on the mainframe."

"First, it enables enterprises to confidently (and smoothly) scale up the performance of sophisticated data analysis and other BI functions against larger volumes of data."

"Second, since more customers view BI as a mission-critical application, why not run it on a resilient and scalable mission-critical platform, which plays directly to the strengths of the mainframe, namely industrial-strength processing power, high-availability, reliability, security and centralized IT manageability."

"Finally, BI is still a growing market. Pushing the software onto the mainframe helps companies to both protect and leverage their mainframe investments (i.e., using BI to drive legacy modernization without replacement of the mainframe)."