As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold. But God only can help, if the question is – Are mainframes surviving?

There’s so much happening around these big boxes that it’s hard to hold the microscope in one place. They are elephants, they are monolithic, they are on a death-bed, they are fighting for survival, they are history and so on and on, as one keeps hearing.

And while these X-ray readings keep volunteering to shout obituaries, there are other industry symptoms that catch your attention. Some enterprises have decided to amputate, while at the same time, other contemporaries are giving mainframes a bear hug.

New workloads, MIPS growth, re-orientation of technology, IBM’s migration factory, zBX blades, and specialty engines are signaling the push for revival. And yet, challenges still keep nailing the proverbial coffin: anti-hegemony rhetoric, anti-trust cases, outdated and unwieldy wheel-chairs to carry them, modern architectures, application modernization and Cloud’s tab at the door bell. So are the so-called elephants surviving it all?

It’s always fun and helpful to talk to someone who can help with some answers before the coffee gets too cold. Someone who can retain the steam and have the outlier approach to analysis.

As it turns out, James Russell, Director MSM Sales & Software Consulting, South Asia, BMC can read the ECG in a not-so-boring way, punctuating it with the right interpretations and a simple cheerful tone. Let’s see what he decoded while I sipped my coffee.

Your main role is in expanding the BMC MSM (Mainframe Service Mgt & Workload Automation) solutions for BMC in the South Asia region. BMC’s recent annual mainframe survey results for the fifth year, of over 1,500 mainframe customers pointed a steady increase of investments in mainframe in the APAC region, even citing that APAC respondents are finding that mainframes are increasingly secure. Then why do we keep reading that ‘Mainframe is dying’. 

What motivates one market can be different for another market. Yes, 84 per cent of respondents expected to see growing or steady MIPS growth on the platform, a figure that has remained consistent over the past several years. About 57 per cent of respondents indicated that the mainframe will grow and attract new workloads over the next year. What I can say here is that the big guys will get better when it comes to core things and it will be characterized as highly-available, well-managed, well-compliant and secure. 

In the survey, a significant number of respondents (65 per cent) were also concerned about reducing IT costs in the next year. What do you make of the equation between mainframes and costs, specially after the attempts made with IBM joining hands with Linux, or contenders like Neon Z Prime? Is there geographical diversity here as well?

Small businesses are facing the option to retain or move to another platform. India etc have different dynamics. In its current state, India will be interesting in the next two to five years. As volumes of data become critical and challenging to manage, new changes may happen. The other dynamic aspect is that mainframes are highly adaptable and highly-transaction-processing-intensive. It would be a compelling factor for large scale servers. The deciding factors will be around how to get in a platform environment, the real estate challenges and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).