'Mainframe is alive and kicking'

‘Mainframe is dead’, is undoubtedly the numero uno cliché in the world of IT today. Any discussion on the subject will in all probability start with this statement, even though the mainframe came down the gallows a few years back. Today, companies across the world, buried under innumerable servers are looking at mainframe as the possible savior.

Indeed, a mainframe does cost more than any of the server. But, as IBM officials would argue, it is the TCO that matters. With mainframe, a company can not only consolidate the hardware resources (1 mainframe versus hundred of servers), the manpower resources, but also have a much lower operating costs. The company has launched a new Z series targeted at the cost conscious business segment.

To increase awareness about mainframe and its Z series, IBM arranged for a seminar Innovizion held in the scenic Aamby Valley, near Pune.

The company had invited CEOs, CIOs and other officials for the same, pitching a case for the Z series. Over the last year or so, close to six pieces have been sold, not a mean thing considering that each piece costs over $100,000 and more.

Ray Jones, vice president (Worldwide Z Series Software Sales), IBM spoke to Shashwat Chaturvedi from CyberMedia News on all things that pertain to mainframes.

Excerpts:

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

Absolutely, the mainframe is indeed alive and kicking. Mainframe revenue is growing; capacity we are shipping continues to grow geometrically. We are now shipping as much capacity each quarter as has existed in all the prior forty years put together. We are growing revenue capacity in an accelerated manner.

But is not the growth in actual terms, i.e., hardware sales, quite modest?

You could say that the hardware numbers are modest. But we look at total business contribution to mainframe, not only in hardware, maintenance, financing, software, 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 mainframe has evolved over the years?

The mainframes that we are delivering today, bears no technical resemblance to the mainframes we were delivering even 4-5 years ago. The similarity is in the name only. 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. Though, let me tell you about a thing that has not changed, 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, 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 even. 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 customers’ investment that has been made or is being made.

One of the main reasons for the return of mainframe has been the gigantic increase in the number of transactions over the years faced by the companies. This increase has been chiefly brought around by the Internet. So 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. We have seen the number of transactions on the mainframe in many of the customer’s triple in the last 3-4 years. And we see that growth 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 max two or three. With the advent of the Internet we are seeing a tsunami effect such that to get to a business transaction (exchange of money for goods or services), now it takes dozens and dozens of transactions. 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 mainframe 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 is not yet up to the mark?

When I returned to the world of mainframe 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, such that 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.

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.

Let’s talk about Linux now; 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 ‘co-opetition’ or a ‘versus Microsoft’ discussion. We see Linux as an exciting technology that has its own life, imagination; we see it, growing up into new things, quite frankly into things that we cannot really anticipate. 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 per cent of all capacity that we are shipping on mainframe, runs Linux applications.

Your views on the Linux developer community in India.

Indian citizens have brought incredible value to the design of IBM mainframe, 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 mainframe evolution. We knew for a fact that there were immense skills for mainframe 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 mainframe is a living and breathing ecosystem.

© CyberMedia News