I attended a SI partner meet hosted by IBM last week. It was interesting to see IBM’s aggressive stance on the mainframe machines.
One of their booths was titled “ The future runs on System Z!” 🙂
While a large majority of the IT universe (users, vendors and consultants) continue to wish away the mainframe predicting its demise anytime soon, the old veteran continues to survive.
It seems that IBM wants to leverage the powerful trends of virtualisation, cloud computing, and green technologies to restore the Mainframe machine to its lost glory and reclaim the ground it lost in the last 2 decades since the advent of desktop.
IBM is now steadily making investments and increasing its thrust on mainframe focussed computing and platforms.
It effectively controls the entire mainframe market with other playes either dead or reduced to marginal plays in limited geographies.
If this strategy works out, IBM would have taken the battle of enterprise computing to areas where it can frame the rules and carve out the battle ground to its advantage.
