IBM: System Z Is Not A Cash Cow

As well as purpose, they’re fit for company politics, said Porell. “Can we solve the customer’s problem? Do they want to build their own software and if so do we have the modern tools, and the simplicity to get time to market. I contend that we do.”

Centralisation is also good for security: “Any time data or information passes between one administration domain to another, it is subject to risk. theft, leakage, hacking and spoofing.” Mainframes can now be interrogated quickly enough to handle real-time analytics. “It used to be that people were crazy if they did analytics on a mainframe – a lot of them operated in batch mode. Now we can do flash copies of data in nanoseconds, and give people insight instead of hindsight.”

What about the monopoly?

But with the gradual retreat of other vendors, IBM is now accused of exploiting a monopoly in mainframes – with the Justice Department investigating alleged abuse. Others have commented that the real problem is the users who have given too much power to mainframe vendors, but the company is getting criticised in countries including India.

Specific complaints have been made by Neon Software, which believes IBM is deliberately limiting what customers can do with its hardware. IBM has added “specialty processors (SPs)” to its mainframes, which customers buy in, to handle certain tasks. Neon has found it is possible to move general mainframe tasks onto SPs and save money, but IBM says this violates its copyrights and users’ contracts.

IBM has made a robust response to Neon’s complaint, and Porell declined to respond in detail on either issue.

“I can’t talk about the monopoly investigation,” he said, “but the mainframe is one of many, many computers in the world. We are competing against Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, and others.”

On Neon’s complaint, he pointed out that mainframes had been built for transaction processing, and specialty processors were added to allow them to handle workloads, which would otherwise be on commodity hardware: “Our goal is to continue to add transaction processing, but bring in new workloads to collaborate with that. Specialty engines recognise the commodity nature of some hardware.”