HP Slates IBM’s Mainframes Bias

The reason for the programme is that many users simply aren’t aware of the cost of not changing, he said: “It is worrying how many people believe that they can ride out the recession by not spending anything, believing in a year or two’s time it will be like it was before. It won’t be.”

The workshops have to be backed by high level commitments, though: “Unless you get CEO backing, line-of-business managers can easily block any change.”

Of course there’s one area where HP’s criticism of IBM is the pot calling the kettle black. It makes an absurdly high proportion of its overall profits from overpriced printer ink, and it does its level best to keep users hooked and block any efforts to make ink cheaper. Luckily, there’s no easy way for HP to build a dependece on printing ink through an application transformation workshop, so users are probably safe there.

And what actually happens?

But what is actually involved in the process of breaking the so-called gridlock? The process is very “top-down” said Evans: “For the last three years, it was all about virtualisation and what people are going to do with the infrastructure. But now people understand that apps are the real thing that kills you – either the volume of them or the complexity of them.”

“It would be nice if application reduction was all about switching apps off, but that’s just the easy bit” he said. “The complexity is the important part”. A lot of apps were written twenty years ago, and no-one actually understands all the interactions they have with other corporate systems. “They have to decide what to do,” he said. “Do they just assume it will run for ever?” In that situation, many people keep paying money to keep apps going form the 1970s, well into the twenty-first century, because they assume “if we don’t touch it, we won’t break it.”

Most users have gone through many paradigms in the last thirty years – and they are still there. “We just pile ’em on,” he said. “Gartner says apps are still growing at between four and seven percent per year in volume, yet most companies have never taken any of them off.”

He tells of a user running Natural Adabas [Adabas is Software AG’s database from the 1970s, and Natural is its fourth generation language]. “You would not believe how much it is costing us to run an obsolete system.” The problem isn’t the hardware – it’s disentangling from the old software, he said.

And there are other reasons you can’t just switch an app off. “If you are in the financial services industry, you have to keep all records for seven years,” he points out. This means out you need a permanent copy of all the records – and a working copy of any programs you need to read them, before you switch the application off.

Despite the difficulties, users are moving, simply because of the pressure on costs: “The recession is accelerating, rather than decelerated application transformation. People are taking stock of their costs.”

In the end, he said, when users tot up the costs of their IT, “they find that big hungry mainframes eat power and cost a fortune in software licensing.” They also run the most critical applications, and have been immune from cuts for some time because to turn them off would be unthinkable.

Now, though, there are plenty of companies that have no mainframes at all – Evans mentioned HP itself and the New York Stock Exchange. “I still meet clients who say there are things you cannot do without a mainframe – but that is because IBM brainwashes them.”