''Mainframe is alive and kicking''

We all know that mainframe isn't dead, but then is it alive and kicking?

Absolutely. Mainframe is indeed alive and kicking. Mainframe revenue is growing. We are now shipping as much capacity each quarter as has existed in all the prior 40 years put together. We are growing revenue capacity in an accelerated manner.

But isn't the growth in actual terms quite modest?

You could say that the hardware numbers are modest. But we look at total business contribution to mainframe not only in hardware, but also in maintenance, financing, software and services terms. When one looks at that broader stack, mainframe has a substantial contribution to IBM that simply goes beyond the hardware revenue. That being said, as hardware grows other elements are also growing. Thus, with each passing day, mainframe is growing in importance for IBM.

Can you touch upon how the mainframe has evolved over the years?

The mainframes that we are delivering today bear no technical resemblance to the mainframes we were delivering even 4-5 years ago. In terms of hardware, software, cooling, capacity, applications, everything, there is a world of difference between the mainframes of today and that of yesterday. So the evolution has been thoroughly comprehensive in nature and very rapid in the rate of pace. However, customers who wrote applications that ran on mainframes even 40 years ago are still running today and giving business benefits. For instance, two years back we had the 40th anniversary of the mainframe and I had interacted with a customer who wrote the very first database applications for the IBM 360, in the late 1960s. The applications that he wrote are still up and running and delivering business value. To sum it up, technology has undergone a complete change and as I peer into the future, I see a quickening of that change process, even as we protect customer investment that has been made or is being made.

Can one say that Internet has saved the mainframe from extinction?

Clearly, the Internet has had a significant, positive effect on the growth of mainframes. And the growth is continuing unabated. Customers are of the view that the more they get Internet traffic, the harder it is for them to associate revenue for them with a transaction. Years ago, a transaction was a simple thing; it was money for a good or a service. And it was typically a single transaction, at the maximum two or three. As the customers see their transactions volume growing, in many cases faster than their businesses, they are telling us that we must continue to evolve the mainframes to provide very low cost per transaction, so that they can balance revenue and costs and deliver value to the shareholders. So the Internet has helped the mainframe.

How is the mainframe software ecosystem evolving?

There is a feeling that it's not yet up to the mark. When I returned to the world of mainframes six years ago, the perception was a fact. Then, it was clear that if we did not re-engineer the software stack, we would not be able to participate in continued growth with IT in servers and software. So I have worked very closely in IBM R&D to systematically do that re-engineering. Today, the mainframe is highly open, consistent with open standards, and in many cases it delivers common software with many other platforms. We envision the mainframe as a super-highway, with on-ramps and off-ramps. Such that customers are able to shift workloads to the mainframes when it makes business sense and shift it out when it doesn't.

The Internet has had a significant, positive effect on the growth of mainframes, and the growth is continuing unabated Does that mean you are content with the ecosystem?

What I have learnt over the years is that I must never be content. Mainframe must evolve at a rapid pace. I have regular discussions at IBM and outside on ways that the ecosystem can be further expanded.

When IBM started offering Linux, it was touted as a Microsoft killer. What is the current scenario?

Linux as an environment offers customers significant opportunities to port workloads into environments that make sense for them. We believe that the openness, with which Linux has been developed, enables the world of IT to add new capability faster because of the contribution of many software developers around the world. We do not see Linux simply as a 'versus Microsoft' discussion, but as an exciting technology that has its own life, imagination. I was in the very room when IBM made the decision to put Linux on the mainframe. We had no idea as to why it would be so successful, as it has been. We thought we did, but truly we did not. That's very exciting. We learnt as we went, and today 25% of all capacity that we are shipping on mainframe, runs Linux applications.

What's your take on the Linux developer community in India?

Indian citizens have brought incredible value to the design of IBM mainframes, the lead designer on Z series is an Indian, and the leaders of our initiative on advanced relational database are Indians. We highly value Indians as partners and co-workers, as we look to increase the rate and pace of the mainframe evolution. We knew for a fact that there were immense skills for mainframes in India, both in Z and in Linux. I continue to hire in India and hope to keep doing so for a long time to come.

Is China now the test base for the mainframe, considering the amount of hardware being bought by Chinese companies?

It is. But so are Brazil, Europe, Russia or even India. We see expansion on all fronts in different ways, globally. We must continue to invest growth all over boundaries, only then it will be a testament that the mainframe is a living and breathing ecosystem.

Source: Dataquest